Cornell University ECE576 Advanced Microcontroller Final Projects

Bruce Land teaches a great course at Cornell University called Advanced Microcontroller Systems on a Programmable Chip (ECE576). This looks to be the big brother to this course. Bruce was kind enough to drop us a line to share the latest group of ECE576 Final Projects.

They are all impressive but here are a few of my favorites.


This is the Light Source Motion Tracking project. One thing to remember about these projects is that the Altera is doing all the work, there is no computer crunching numbers in the background.

“The main goal of this project was to accurately detect motion and report the speed of moving light sources in the view of a camera. One can easily imagine many uses for such a device. For example, a night-vision goggle that sees certain light spectrums and is able to detect enemy motion in real-time. The project was implemented on an Altera DE2 development board with a Nios II CPU instantiated in hardware, along with a Terasic TRDB_DC2 1.3 Megapixel camera, speakers, and a VGA monitor. The development was done using the Quartus II IDE and the NIOS II IDE. The image capturing and filtering were implemented in hardware, while the position and vector calculations were done in the Nios II CPU. ”


Jezzball brings back childhood memories for me also. Well done guys!

“The objective of the game is to trap the bouncing ball in the smallest space possible by drawing lines to cut off the area in which the ball can roam. To play this game, move the mouse to the location where you want the line to be drawn. If the left button on the mouse is clicked, a vertical line will be drawn from that point; if the right button is clicked a horizontal line is drawn. If the line reaches the boundary on both sides without the ball hitting it, the line will become a new boundary for the ball. However, if the ball bumps into the line before it has finished drawing, the game ends. Try to clear as much of the area without the ball hitting the line as it is drawing. The level is cleared if you trap the ball in a small enough area. In the next level, you will have to clear an even smaller area. Good luck and have fun!”

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