I am forced to admit that – as usual – those little scamps at Altium are being their typical innovative selves. Who else would have come up with the concept of a physical incarnation of an e-card, which is, after all, supposed to be an electronic (sort of virtual) incarnation of a real card.

So here's the deal. I just saw a blog by Benjamin Jordan titled Season's Greetings to Everyone at Techbites (A little frivolity for you all). On the basis that I can do with all the frivolity I can get, so I immediately bounced over to see what was going on.

Now, I don’t know about you, but this is the time of the year that I receive a lot of e-cards in my in-box from companies around the world. The images are always very pleasant on the eye (some are animated, some are humorous), and the sentiments expressed are always very much appreciated. After perusing a couple of hundred of these little rascals, however, you sort of get to feel like you've "seen it all" ... and then along comes Altium (grin).

So, Altium's Christmas Card (shown above) features a video of a Christmas tree with flashing lights accompanied by music supplied by an iPod. The audio stream from the iPod is passed into one of Altium's Nanoboards, where a TSK3000 RISC soft core processor in an FPGA processes the signal through three 2nd-order biquad digital filters. The absolute value from these filters is then passed through moving average FIR filters. In turn, the outputs from the FIR filters are used to drive some Pulse Width Modulated (PWM) outputs that control the LEDs lighting the Christmas tree.

As Benjamin says, this approach may be a little like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, but it is a lot of fun. Even more fun is the fact that you can click the "Behind the Scenes" link to see another video that tells how this all came about, and also download the project files so that you can play with this yourself (assuming you have a Nanoboard).

The bottom line is that – out of all the e-cards I've seen (and I've seen a lot, let me tell you), this is the first one that made me want to see how it was made and that moved me to write a blog about it. I mean, if you'd told me when I came into work this morning that I would be blogging about a cool e-card... well, I'd have laughed at you... which makes me wonder what other cool things the day will being...