Welcome

The Northeastern University Blackfin (NEU-Fin) Labs are an outgrowth of the labs taught in the ECE department at NEU. The intention of this website to provide more general and open revisions of these labs to all those interested in using the Blackfin processor for other universities, self-learning, or other non-profit use.

Labs

We currently have five labs but plan to add more in the future. These labs were written to introduce a range of topics, while providing sufficient depth. Lab 1 covers basic board-level input/output using LEDs and push buttons. Lab 2 covers controller design for a washing machine as modelled with a finite state machine. Lab 3 covers UART/RS232 communications. Lab 4 covers simple RSA encryption. Finally Lab 5 covers image processing.

Tutorials

In addition to labs are tutorials that provide step-by-step guides - including screenshots, embedded Quicktime movies, and other media when appropriate.

Equipment

Our labs were originally written to use the Blackfin BF561 EZ-KIT Lite evaluation board and the VisualDSP++ Integrated Development and Debugging Environment. We hope to include other Blackfin boards and additional toolchains (such as the Linux-based Blackfin STAMP boards and the GNU Compiler Collection.