Philip A Covington’s Blog

New Job: I start a new position with the Ohio State University Department of Astronomy in the Imaging Sciences Laboratory on Monday December the 19th. This marks the end of my 5 year stint as a factory automation consultant. I learned a lot in those five years, but I am glad to be moving to something new, interesting, and challenging. Before going out on my own as a consultant, I worked as an Electrical Engineer with a Department of Defense contractor in the 1980s and early 90s. The company was Piqua Engineering, Inc. - I worked there for 10 years. After PEI a few former employees and I started a company called Technitron Labs, Inc. TL's main product was specialized instrumentation for paper mills, municipal waste and drinking water treatment plants, and industrial water treatment plants. TL was sold after a few years (along with my designs); I moved on to doing Controls Engineering at a company called Zed Industries, Inc. Zed made packaging machinery and thermo-formers...

HPSDR Progress: I am now able to configure the Spartan 3 FPGA over USB. I switched from slave parallel mode to slave serial configuration loading. This will make the FX2 firmware easy to use with Altera Cyclone FPGAs in addition the the Xilinx Spartan 3. I am in the process of getting samples of Linear Technology's LTC2208 16 bit, 135 MSPS ADC. I still plan to develop a QSD based RX board using the TI PCM4202 as the ADC - So there will be a high bandwidth path as well as a low bandwidth path in the HPSDR. The LTC2208 board will probably get it's own FPGA to do DDC. The DDC's ouput will then feed the Spartan 3 which will be responsible for performing the second part of the DSP chain. Verilog Projects for the Xylo Board: I set up a folder on my server that people can browse . It will contain various verilog projects that can be tried on the Xylo board for educational purposes. http://www.philcovington.com/FPGA/