FPGA Project Recommendations?

jmcoreymv

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Oct 9, 1999
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I'm looking for a project I can work on over the next few months that involves an FPGA, anyone have any good ideas? Could be something with interfacing to a computer, display, DSP, etc.
 

bobsmith1492

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Feb 21, 2004
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Build a computer game; that's what the folks in VHDL class did for their project last winter (glad I wasn't in the class! Saturday....)
 

smack Down

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Sep 10, 2005
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Originally posted by: bobsmith1492
Build a computer game; that's what the folks in VHDL class did for their project last winter (glad I wasn't in the class! Saturday....)

How the heck did anyone make a video game in VHDL? That just seems insane unless by video game you mean something like tic tac toe using leds.
 

jmcoreymv

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Oct 9, 1999
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Originally posted by: smack Down
Originally posted by: bobsmith1492
Build a computer game; that's what the folks in VHDL class did for their project last winter (glad I wasn't in the class! Saturday....)

How the heck did anyone make a video game in VHDL? That just seems insane unless by video game you mean something like tic tac toe using leds.

I'm guessing pong wouldn't be too hard either. I was thinking about a project that I could interface to a PC via serial port maybe using labview or c#. Just trying to get some ideas.
 

Lord Banshee

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Sep 8, 2004
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someone guy in my Digital Design Class made breakout 2 weeks ago, he said it only took 4 hours. It was basically a bunch of flip-flops :), this was before learning how to use the ram on the FPGA.

But something on similar lines interface with the PC.. You could make a serial interface via FPGA going thought a RS-232 chip then serial connection to the PC and display images from off of your PC though your FPGA to VGA... Then once you get this done make some kind of color detections or filtering real-time on the FPGA before it is displayed on screen. This is actually something i was going to try as we are doing serial communication right now in my class... but i am really too busy this semester with other things to do too much fun stuff :(
 

jmcoreymv

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Oct 9, 1999
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Does anyone have any experience with doing audio playback with an FPGA. For example, if I had a dev board and I wanted to load some audio samples into the flash memory, and then have the FPGA play them out through a D/A to a speaker, is this pretty simple? Anyone done this before?
 

Lord Banshee

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Sep 8, 2004
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well if you plan on createing the code to decode the media sample your self it would be a hard project but i believe you can download free ip cores that do midi and mp3 decoding and such.

i think fpga4fun (google it) does something like that
 

jmcoreymv

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Oct 9, 1999
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I wasn't planning on compressing it. Just storing the actual 12-16 bit samples in the flash memory and playing them out at 44 khz or whatever sampling rate. These would be very short audio clips. Maybe a second each.
 

smack Down

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Sep 10, 2005
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Originally posted by: jmcoreymv
I wasn't planning on compressing it. Just storing the actual 12-16 bit samples in the flash memory and playing them out at 44 khz or whatever sampling rate. These would be very short audio clips. Maybe a second each.

That would be real easy to do. Just a counter and memory.
 

bobsmith1492

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Feb 21, 2004
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Originally posted by: smack Down
Originally posted by: bobsmith1492
Build a computer game; that's what the folks in VHDL class did for their project last winter (glad I wasn't in the class! Saturday....)

How the heck did anyone make a video game in VHDL? That just seems insane unless by video game you mean something like tic tac toe using leds.

They made a game with some stuff moving around the screen; I don't remember what exactly but something like that game where the ball bounces up and down and knocks out bricks on the top of the screen while you control a paddle at the bottom. Basically they had to program each pixel on the screen individually but just lumped a bunch together so it had pretty low resolution.
 

helpme

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Feb 6, 2000
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As a project when I was in school I did the following:

Built a microblaze based system on a Virtex2 Pro based board.
Used a port of Linux (uClinux) as the operating system.
Got OpenSSL to run on the system.
Designed a hardware accelerator to speed up AES-128.
Connected the hardware accelerator to the Microblaze and modified the software to use it.

System had ethernet and serial for terminal communications, and loaded its configuration via a systemAce controller and CF onboard.
 

jmcoreymv

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Oct 9, 1999
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Originally posted by: helpme
As a project when I was in school I did the following:

Built a microblaze based system on a Virtex2 Pro based board.
Used a port of Linux (uClinux) as the operating system.
Got OpenSSL to run on the system.
Designed a hardware accelerator to speed up AES-128.
Connected the hardware accelerator to the Microblaze and modified the software to use it.

System had ethernet and serial for terminal communications, and loaded its configuration via a systemAce controller and CF onboard.

Did you just use an eval version of the Microblaze core?
 

helpme

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Feb 6, 2000
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I 'acquired' the Xilinx EDK, which comes with a license for the Microblaze (and PPC if your chip has them). I assume you're a student right?