What's the frequency Kenneth?

So yeah, the subject is the name of a REM song. It was big when I was a teenager. Anyways..

Dr. He and I had a little chat today. Kinda got me going in a better direction. I broke out the signal generator, and hooked it up to one of the analog inputs. That wasn't the hard part.

I even got the FGPA VI done for it. Working on the Host VI side of it though. Getting the data seems to be pretty easy, but getting it into a workable form is another story. Since it is sampled data, it is a digital signal so to speak. Here is where I'm lacking a bit of knowledge.. Do I dump the digital signal into a 1D array, then generate a waveform? Or is there a way to take the digital data, and drop it straight out to a waveform that I can see? Still working on that.. Until next friday.

-Kyle

Progresso

Soo.... John had a lot of questions today, and we worked on a couple VIs. This capturing sound idea is quite a bit to chew. Just taking in a lot of information, and it is taking me down some complex roads. We'll get there though, or at least have a pretty good understanding of why we can't get there. Pick one.

Have a great weekend.

-Kyle

push it to the limit

So today we did a lot of research and conversations about things we were working on. I will post the updated VI from before for download as an edit to this blog entry later.

fixed the blinkers

With the help of Kyle we figured out that since we were plugged into the digital I/O and the high pins we needed to change the vi somewhat to reflect this. This sort of thinking about problems helps. We must remember that we are not only writing code (or perhaps drawing it in this case), we are also interacting with an electronic circuit board. Picture of the VI is included.

Good information on data acquisition from fpga's

In my research I came across a helpful example showing a host file doing data acquisition. The downloadable file was written in labview 8.6 which is incompatible with 8.5 but the pictures of the block diagram are none-the-less interesting.

http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-4048

What I've been doing this week

I am posting what I have been working on this week. Hopefully it makes sense to some people. I have included a link to download all of the files I have been working on.

Sound Acquisition

Hope you enjoy!

learning FPGA's

For anyone learning LabVIEW FPGA I recommend the NI demo that was recommended to Kyle. It offers a good groundwork to work from that helps the user understand what the wizard creates and how each piece works together. I have included the link for future reference.

http://www.ni.com/swf/presentation/us/labview/lvfpga/default.htm

Analog sampling, so it begins

Just reading through some tutorials about analog sampling.. Great buzz words for sampling are sampling rate, Nyquist's thereom, quantization, and dithering.

http://zone.ni.com/wv/app/doc/p/id/wv-291

Also, here is what I have been going through today as well:
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3405

Quite a lot to learn.

-Kyle

Moving on to Rock -n- Roll Sampling

Alright.. John and I had a good talk with Dr. He today regarding next steps, and a little proof of concept on LEDs.

Next milestone so to speak.. The ultimate goal is to sample a sound card out of a computer.
That has a lot of facets, of which, I need to explore exactly how to do it. Just a sampler of requisites for sampling sound is: For accurate measurements, the sampling rate of the system should be at least twice the frequency of the signals being acquired. Pulled that off the NI website. (http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/7110#toc1)

Then from there, off to photomultipliers, and sampling them, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. Anyways... I'm off to do some more research on sampling sound. I'm going to start on the above link, and follow the proverbial rabbit hole.

-Kyle