Are you "good" with money?

@comp_atkins:

-analog guitar pedal with MCU to switch the circuit from a remote digital switch for my friend in a wheelchair. (Revision is planned to have DSP for delay effects).

-gameboy to vga converter (resolution scaled to 160x144*(3x3)) using an fpga

-NESrgb, SNESrgb to get scart video out of console to use with my xrgb mini video scaler.

-GameCube to HDMI mod using fpga (code written by someone else).

Currently

-GBA to HDMI using fpga. Going to make that into a gba home console controlled by snes controller (prob use mcu to decode snes controller signal). Video signal is same as old gameboy, parallel RGB data with some timing clocks. Should be straight forward.

-doing a real-time image processing system using fpga and camera sensor for my research. Stuff like edge detection and motion estimation. goal is stereo vision but with my sensors I would need one hell of a calibration system. Likely stereo with current sensors is dead end.

-senior design, clone of xrgb mini. Inputs are s-video, component, scart, and vga. Output is HDMI. Should have digital audio and firmware be updateable via SD card. I'm doing the image processing with an fpga (who would've guessed :p ). Plan was to have everything on one pcb, but i didn't want to mess with a BGA package chip without proper tools (the Fpga IC is $40 and we are self funded). So using Nexys video board for fpga and everything else is on a pcb connected through the fmc port.

-been trying to mess with making repro snes and NES games for myself (using donor pcb). I really want to make my own flash cart...but the NES has all those mappers and the SNES has ALUs on the carts...so part of me says screw that for now.

I tend to overwhelm myself with projects. I really like image/video processing on the hardware level. My plan is to do my Phd in signal processing (was originally reconfigurable computing systems but I lacked the pre-reqs of computer science 1&2 lmao :/ ) with a focus on image stuff.

(Hope I didn't bore anyone)

I'm crap with money. The wife and I just got a £12k loan to consolidate both our credit card debts, so now we just have the one payment a month which is half of what we were paying on the credit cards. So, it's a step in the right direction. Need to get on a save though.

Good enough.

A slew of large bills aside, my savings account always seems to balance out (no idea how).

@achilles614: awesome. lots of fpga work going on there! i don't have any experience w/ video processing but got some fpga exposure w/ work a few years ago. they're pretty sweet.

I couldn't agree more. I do just the same.

To help me realise how much money I spend on more or less pointless things, I decided to write it down in a small bank/check balance notebook I got.