An Education On SoC Using Verilog

[Bruce Land] is one of those rare individuals who has his own Hackaday tag. He and his students at Cornell have produced many projects over the years that have appeared on these pages, lately with FPGA-related projects. If you only know [Land] from projects, you are missing out. He posts lectures from many of his classes and recently added a series of new lectures about developing with a DE1 System on Chip (SoC) using an Altera Cyclone FPGA using Verilog. You can catch the ten lectures on YouTube.

The class material is different for 2017, so the content is fresh and relevant. The DE1-SOC has a dual ARM processor and boots Linux from an SD card. There are several labs and quite a bit of background material. The first lab involves driving a VGA monitor. Another is a hardware solver for ordinary differential equations.

We have to admit, we were amused to hear [Land] open with a anecdote about one of the times he had a project featured on Hackaday. He apparently attracted some ugly comments, which we found hard to believe since we know Hackaday comments are renowned for their kindness and civility.

Some of the past projects from [Land’s] classes include a robotic camera dolly, and a polygraph. They also do interesting things with computer vision and other very serious projects.

Thanks to our pal [Brandon Dunson] for alerting us to these lectures.

13 thoughts on “An Education On SoC Using Verilog

    1. Well, he is at Cornell… a place with notoriously awesome students.
      Those kids are always outstanding at engineering competitions.
      =)

      Anecdotally, I have observed that the better teachers are often less popular with ambitious students.

  1. “He apparently attracted some ugly comments, which we found hard to believe since we know Hackaday comments are renowned for their kindness and civility.”

    Replacing posters with AI will solve that problem.

  2. There is no gift better than what a person can give to others by teaching them something. If people make cheap shots then shame on them for having such small minds. If you really want to know something then try teaching it to someone else. It’s time to have and show respect.

  3. Is he talking about this,

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4tIfvVjNnI

    and this,

    http://hackaday.com/2017/01/02/gravity-simulations-with-an-fpga/

    It is just random people complaining about YouTube having a seizure and dropping random stuff onto their trending tab, you know that tab you never look at because it is like a garbage dump for memes, fads, narcissistic YouTube celebrities and other pointless stuff you would never be interested in.

  4. Wow. 20+ years doing real shit with real FPGA’s solving real problems in the real world for REAL money and this asshole even intimidated me. WTF? How are intimidated his students feeling? after having been to 30+ Altera training classes, designing many SDR’s, engine control units, and crypto cracker’s, I feel like I might fail his class if I had any other classes to take that semester… this idiot is a total disgrace. Failure as a teacher. I can only think that his “successful” students have a superiority complex and are very good at lecture regurgitation, or this ass hat needs to “tone it down” about 15 notches and be happy if his students can realistically and successfully build a hardware multiplier and perhaps instantiate some other blocks and fully understand the process. Attention teacher: You are not as smart as your mommy says you are. Take it down a notch.

    1. Eh? Admittedly I only skimmed through the included lecture video; can you cite some timestamps where he’s being a “total disgrace” as you called him? The parts I watched look like standard first-day uni lectures to me.

      1. The insecurity is strong with the entitled that earned a crowd-sourced degree on social networking cheat platforms.
        I am sure the list of accomplishments were borrowed from others as well.

        Ezekiel (18:2): “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

    2. It’s a 5000-level class at Cornell. I don’t think Bruce has to worry about covering too much material, and he knows exactly what prerequisites the students have had. His game is keeping some of the brightest engineering students in the country interested — he’s not going to dumb it down.

      And as for the “build a hardware multiplier” comment — you have seen the projects that come out of this class, right? Who do you think is building those? It’s a project-based class after all.

      And you’re rude.

  5. Quite frankly, I wish we had a guy like this teaching in our university. Good teachers are sometimes controversial. Having seen the kind of projects his students and himself make, I must say I’m impressed.

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