my name is mwd

My office mates have become increasingly amused by the way my desk has turned into a den of kit. I’ve got two Xilinx development boards, each with a clock board, connected by a large number of cables, a rather large oscilloscope (a ‘scope so adnvanced and posh it boots XP Pro when you switch it on!), a heavy duty power supply, and so on. I’ve got so much stuff that if my phone goes I have to walk around the office to find it on the other side of the set of desks I sit at :)

Anyway, this is all in aid of the SOAPS optical networking project I’m working on. The Xilinx boards are being used to prototype hosts on the network, and hopefully a third board will join it soon to be the network switch. Currently I’m testing it all electrically, but once that’s done we’ll move it over to driving optical stuff. Fun fun fun. Tonight I managed for the first time to get two boards to talk to each other (not all down to me I hasten to add, I just happened to be the one doing this bit of integration amoungst the other stuff I do). Anyway, data went from one board and back to the other, so I feel like we’ve made a bit of progress. It may not sound impressive, but it’s a big step forwards towards getting the whole prototype network built.