Microprocessor Interfacing Course

The course that I am taking this semester is all about how to interface a microprocessor with external sensors and signals, and there is a final design project required at the end of the semester that uses the microcontroller board that is required for the course. We need to propose the project topic, and what it would be used for. The processor itself is a Freescale HCS12, which I am actually already familiar with (thankfully...).

So I have been kicking around a few ideas about what to do for my project that would be interesting, and is still 'finishable' with a team of 3 or 4 people. Most of my classmates have been talking about robotic type projects using various sensors and actuators, but I really wanted to tie this into my computer graphics interests and knowledge. After some thinking I came up with the following two ideas:

1. Create a small scale video game console, requiring input acquisition, with sound and video otuput. Sounds interesting, but throughput of the processor could be an issue (only 25 MHz clock!)

2. Create a scaleable rendering pipeline out of several of these processor boards. This one would essentally create a FULLY programmable rendering pipeline, and could eventually be made to automatically incorporate multiple separate processors to perform vertex shader, pixel shader, raster output, and so on. The input to the array of processors would likely just be a serial port from a host PC, with the output images either written to an NTSC video output signal or back to the PC via some interface (bandwidth for the output signal to the PC could be troublesome...)

Of the two, I would like to work on #2 a bit more. It is really not a practical thing, but would be a good learning experience I'm sure. It could even implement a subset of one of the graphics API's as well, assuming we could get enough time.

Anyhow, that is what I came up with. Does anyone still reading this have any feedback on these ideas, or something even more interesting? I'd love to hear what you guys think about it...