Update 1 ( 4.26.04 )

Nathaniel Brown and Chris Mordue

Parts

We have a USB camera (a Veo Connect) and an FPGA proto-board. The cell phone we are going to use for the user interface is on order (the development tools to program is can be downloaded from Nokia.com). We have not connected with Waylon yet to pick up our personal server but expect to do so tomorrow.

Cost: The only thing we have had to order is the cell phone and Waylon did that for us. That cost is unknown to us. The USB webcam is Chris' and therefore is not a cost.

Experimentation

We found a USB controller for the FPGA and have looked at the code and are in the process of understanding it more completely. The papers describing its functionality describe it as being able to perform the operations we expect to need. This was found from the old CSE hardware lab.

**We have had several failed attempts with the camera with various USB tracer programs.**

Construction and Debugging Plan

One of the primary things for the next period of the project is to get the USB controller working on the FPGA. This will entail figure out how to synthesize the controller code onto the FPGA. We will then want to verify that we can send and receive appropriate standard USB protocol packets. There is a program we can run on the computer to verify the FPGA is sending "good" USB commands. We already have the software for this debugging step.

The other major thing to work on is communication with the USB camera. We have done numerous web-searches for documentation on webcam communication protocol and have come up nearly empty handed. MS has a particular format that is used but getting to any sort of bit-level expected behavior could not be discerned. Our approach now is to use a USB tracer to find out the communication strings for the webcam. We hope to soon be able to send start and stop commands from the computer to the webcam. And following success with that, to capture/understand the format of the image the camera sends back to the computer.

From here we will be integrating the two above mentioned parts. We will be writing a couple modules on the FPGA to talk to the webcam through the USB controller. At the same time, we will begin the image processing program. We are first going to write the algorithm in C or Java to make sure we understand the resizing algorithm and to produce a code-base that is easily rewritten in an HDL.

Appendices

Division of labor:

Nathaniel is currently working on the FPGA stuff.

Chris is currently working on the webcam stuff.