Hi.

As a few of you may know, for quite a while (ie more than 8 years) I've been working on a variety of remote piloted vehicle systems, mostly for my own amusement. The ultimate goal is for flying radio controlled aircraft, but quite a lot of the development has been on ground-based stuff for the simple reason that a system crash doesn't involve quite as many bits to dig out of the ground

The latest remote piloted buggy, based on an old electric wheelchair, was at the 10th empeg birthday party that various BBS members went to. The VR helmet system I was using there is about the 4th generation I've designed, and finally does pretty much everything I want but was rather bulky. I redesigned it into a much smaller form factor, and have just finished building the first set of PCBs. The processor board came up perfectly on the first attempt, and I've so pleased (and relieved) I felt I had to mention it

I packed it down from a backpack about 50cm x 60cm x 15cm to a box 10 x 12 x 5cm, and less than half a kilo from around 8kg. The ultimate goal is to build the entire thing into a VR helmet, but that's for later.

There's quite a bit in the box:

CPU board specs

200MHz EP9307 ARM9 processor (not the best implementation around, in fact it's pretty buggy, but I've been working with it for three years and know where most of the bugs are. In fact I found several of them, and how to work around them. The main thing is that it has a very configurable video subsection, which I needed)

64MB PC100 SDRAM
16MB flash
VGA output port
18 bit TFT output
Touch screen interface
I2S codec interface x 3
3 axis +-2/8g accelerometer
3 x serial, 2 at RS232 levels, one at 3V TTL
3 x USB2 HS host ports
3 x USB1.1 FS host ports
SPI
MicroSD card socket
I2C at 3.3V and 5V
10/100M ethernet
Runs from 8V to 24V power with on board SMPSU
Full data and control busses on expansion ports
Loads of GPIO lines

Graphics Overlay Board specs

2 x CVBS/Svideo/Component video input stream capture ports
24 bit TFT output port
VGA output port
24 bit stereo codec (line in, line out, Mic in, S/PDIF output)
Digital video expansion for stacked CVBS output board
Video processor which does:

PIP
PBP
Genlock
Chroma Key
Alpha blending, translucency, etc
Input and output scaling
and many other effects

The idea is that the processor board, which runs linux, generates onscreen graphics for virtual flight instruments from real time telemetry received from the remote vehicle, which the graphics board then blends and overlays onto the live video from the same source, in full colour. The prototypes, which I've been working on for around three years, worked very well, so I finally did a finished version.

Two graphics boards can be stacked on a processor board for full stereo operation. With one overlay board and one cpu card, the whole thing fits neatly into an off-the-shelf aluminium box giving a really nice looking system.

I mention it here as (A) I'm really pleases it works after nearly a year of design work, and three days solid of assembling the PCBs, and (B) possibly someone can think of other uses for it.

pca