stopwatch

UART Controlled Stopwatch Using an FPGA


Being able to interface an FPGA project with a device that has a serial port allows for a basic means of sending and receiving data between the FPGA and a PC. For this we need to implement a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) circuit within the FPGA system. You can then use a PC with an RS232 Serial port (shown above) to interface the FPGA with a PC, assuming your development board has the port and voltage conversion circuitry.

Because RS232 is a dated protocol that sometimes isn’t available on modern PC’s, another option is to use a USB-Serial converter chip, which connects to a USB port.

In this post I will detail a UART controlled stopwatch, designed for the Basys 2, using the same stopwatch implementation as in my previous post. To communicate with the PC through serial  we will implement a UART receiver and transmitter circuit, as well as a master control circuit that routes all the pieces together. We will then be able to control the stopwatch’s start, stop, and clear functions by sending ascii characters from the PC to the FPGA’s UART receiver circuit, and also send the current stopwatch time from the FPGA’s Transmitter circuit to the PC for viewing.

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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.
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