Hopeless, fpga project

[sht11help]

Hi, i am a electronic engineering student and i have been given the task of building and progamming in VHDL an fpga to control a dc motor water pump, the problem is i am inexperienced with VHDL and FPGAs and really dont know where to start......

i need to interface a pressure sensor and a temperature sensor to a microblaze fpga so when the sensors read values to a certain treshold they switch a Dc motor water pump to come on and then it should turn back off when the sensors leave the set treshold.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated,

Yours sincerly, Arthur[/b]

 

[mmarco76]

It's not so difficult as you can image.
Start to design your electric schematic and than regoup the pin into the FPGA by function.
In FPGA you'll simply have to design the protocol of communications that your sensor need in order to read the data.
Or if you've simply a bus with the data going out of your ADC converter that are always out, I suggest you to acquire them and consider valid only if you see the same value after some period of time.

Always give to your FPGA at least a clock (modern FPGA are designed in order to implement synchronous project) and plan what you've to do.

I can't sincerly understand if the problem is that you're new at all about a project of this kind or if it's that you don't know VHDL.
If that's the second you'll simply have to learn it and on the net it's full of quite nice pdf about the argument.

 

[FvM]

I can hardly imagine, that you have been given a project in a completely unknown field without some basic help or introduction. Otherwise, there should be serious doubts regarding the competence of your supervisor.

Microblaze, a software processor core, is usually run on Xilinx FPGA and I expect that you have access to a Xilinx development board, at least for software development and test, if the project implies development of a specific hardware.
There are a lot of tutorials and reference projects supplied by Xilinx and others that can help you to experience the technique of FPGA based software processors. VHDL programming must no necessarily be involved, cause the software processor is programmed in C language.

There may be particular reasons, why the project is intended for a FPGA/Microblaze platform. But according to the information you gave, it's not an obvious FPGA application. I can't see, that it get's any profit by FPGA properties. A small processor with ADC, e. g. a PIC or ATmega, could be rather regarded as a natural platform. But nearly anything can be done with FPGA, so of course, it will work. As said, you need some analog periphery, particularly an ADC to process the measurements.

 

[sht11help]

Hello there, sorry for the late reply

I have been doing some more research and i now know that i will be using a Xilinx Spartan 3 board with a Microblaze soft core processor and to do the same tasks as i mentioned before.

To answer your earlier question i have actually used the spartan board before but it was only for a few hours and supervison was available at the time while now i must do it by myself.

Hope this makes things more clear

Regards

Added after 3 minutes:

The project idea is my own, but the platform that was chosen was by my project leader here who would like to use the spartan board for an educational tool in the future so that must be the platform i will use.

You mentioned the Microblaze must be programmed in C, so does that mean i will need to use 2 languages VHDL for spartan FPGA & "C" for the microblaze?

Added after 1 minutes:

I will have access to the ISE software ect and a Spartan 3 starter board with FPGA..... thanks for your help reply so far

 

[zubair_fast]

Hi every one!!
i am new to fpga and to this portal. i am facing issues in taking input from expansion connector(40-pin expansion for I/O) on Spartan 2E, D2FT (XC2S300) board. can any body help me???

 

[karikalan_t79]

hi,


use a ucf file for the particular board that will help in xilinx or qsf in altera