FPGA Reaction Timer

Reaction time is the duration of time it takes for the brain to interpret a stimulus and do something in reaction to it. The stimulus may be something visual such as a light turning on, something auditory such as a beep, or a touch cue such as a poke. The time it takes for the brain to interpret a stimulus and respond to it can be used as a basic benchmark to measure and compare mental acuity.

We will be implementing a reaction timer on an FPGA that turns on an LED after a psuedorandom period of time, and uses a pushbutton as a reaction input. There will be 3 input buttons: clear, start, and stop. The system will begin in an idle state waiting for the user to press the start button. When the start button is pressed, a random time interval will elapse before the LED turns on. When the LED turns on a reaction timer will begin counting the number of milliseconds until the user presses the stop button. When the stop button is pressed, the reaction time will be shown on a 4 digit 7-segment display in the format “0.000” seconds, up to a value of 9.999 seconds. The user can then press the clear button to reset the time display and go back to the idle state.

For this project we will be using the Basys 2 FPGA development board to implement the design, as it has the 4 digit display, pushbuttons, and LED that we need onboard.

Continue reading →

Advertisement

BCD to Binary Conversion on an FPGA

Binary Coded Decimal format is a binary encoding of decimal numbers that represents each decimal digit by a fixed binary number. For example, 42 is represented in BCD format by the binary representations of 4 and 2, as shown above. The BCD format is common in electronic systems where numeric digits are displayed, as well as in systems where the rounding and conversion errors introduced by binary floating point representation and arithmetic are undesirable.

We will focus on designing a conversion circuit that converts a BCD formatted number to to a binary formatted number. I chose to detail this direction of conversion as binary to BCD conversion circuits are easily be found by a quick web search.

We will consider two algorithms to perform the conversion, the first being a direct arithmetic approach, and the second an iterative algorithm using a finite state machine with data path (FSMD).

We will be designing for the Basys 2 FPGA board which has 8 input switches. We can use the 8 input switches to encode 2 BCD numbers of 4 bits each. We will therefore concern ourselves with designing a circuit to convert a 2 digit BCD number to a 7 bit binary representation (27 = 128 > 99, the largest 2 digit BCD number we can input).

Continue reading →

ATtiny85: Blinking Without Clock Cycles


In the previous post we learned how to blink an LED with an ATtiny85 by using a _delay_ms() function to halt the program execution after turning on and off the LED. The downside to this approach is that the _delay_ms() causes our code to hang up while the function spins in a loop up to the specified time. This is a waste of CPU clock cycles, and makes doing anything else in the event loop nearly impossible. Let’s stop the pointless spinning.

In this post I will introduce the two timer/counter hardware peripherals that are inside the ATtiny85 chip, and show how we can offload the job of blinking an LED to one of them with the added benefit of using no clock cycles on the task. This frees the CPU up to do whatever else we wish while our LED reliably blinks away. If you are coming from a typical Arduino upbringing, this sort of flexibility and power is what makes learning how to truly program a microcontroller and its peripherals worth the effort.
Continue reading →

Getting Started With the ATtiny85: The Little Microcontroller That Could

The ATtiny85 is a cute little AVR microcontroller that might surprise you with what it can do. We will be considering the 8 pin PDIP version shown above, since we can easily stick it in a breadboard and prototype away. In this project, we will get our toolchain up and running for the first time, and flash some code to blink an LED!

Continue reading →

Stopwatch with the Basys 2 FPGA

A stopwatch is a good FPGA project that covers many basic, yet interesting areas of FPGA design. We will need display multiplexing for the multi-digit display, synchronous cascaded counter circuits to increment time registers for seconds and minutes, and a finite state machine to give us start, stop, and reset functionality.

I recently acquired a Basys 2 FPGA development board, which has an on-board 4 digit seven-segment display that lends itself nicely to keeping track of time in MM.SS format. Let’s build a stopwatch.
Continue reading →

Square Wave Generator and PWM with a Numato Elbert v2 FPGA

Last time we outlined how to divide down an FPGAs clock frequency using a basic counter circuit. This allowed us to have varying blinking frequencies for our LEDs depending on which bits of the counter register we tied them to.

What if we needed to adjust for a specific frequency of blinking, of wanted to adjust the time the LED is on vs off? What we are looking for is a programmable square wave generator. I will show you how we can program an FPGA in Verilog to act as one that takes two 4-bit inputs to control the on/off periods of the square wave.

Once we have went through the process of adjusting the on/off timing of a square wave, creating an adjustable PWM output for an LED comes naturally. We will see how to program an FPGA to output a PWM signal that allows us to adjust the brightness of an LED based on a 4 bit input signal.

Continue reading →

Blinking LEDs with a Numato Elbert V2 FPGA

FPGA Development boards usually run on a high frequency oscillator in the tens or hundreds of Megahertz range. One way to toggle an IO line at a slower frequency is to use a counter circuit. I will show you how to write some Verilog code that divides down a high clock frequency to a more human friendly time scale, and blink some LEDs!

Continue reading →

Scrolling Text On LED Matrices with an AVR MCU

The 8×8 LED matrix is a fun place to begin learning about how to control LEDs in a way that expresses something meaningful. You can create static images such as smiley faces, sprites, characters, and with some coding magic even create scrolling text and animations.

In this posting I will detail how to control 8×8 LED matrices with the MAX7219 Driver chip to create a cascaded scrolling text display. I will be using an AVR ATmega328P Microcontroller programed in C with the avr-gcc compiler.

Continue reading →