Ethan and Franco's Project Smiley Face Typed Out

Inspiration

As Electrical Engineering students, we were interested in the hardware aspect of this hackathon. We decided we wanted to test the limits of QNX's RTOS using a a stream of data fast enough to give it a good benchmark.

What it does

Essentially a software-based oscilloscope. It ingests raw data streams from an FPGA and visualizes them in a terminal-based interface. It monitors system jitter in real-time, proving the reliability and timing precision of the QNX.

How we built it

We used a Raspberry Pi 5 running QNX's RTOS. We established a serial communication link between the FPGA and the Pi via GPIO. The visualization engine was written in Python, utilizing a custom-built ASCII rendering system that uses ANSI escape sequences for high-performance, flicker-free, and color-coded waveform displays.

Challenges we ran into

Trying to get the FPGA and our PC to communicate on the same network, leading to a few hours lost Being transported to an I/O menu on QNX with no visible point of exit Configuring our microSD as a FAT drive, which led to a few hours lost

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud that we were able to get our jitter consistently under 150 microseconds (Considering we did not use C) Able to use the FPGA and get it to connect Managed to get around QNX's RTOS