Posted March 15, 2012 by Chris

“This project shows the process of choosing parts, building a schematic, connecting the hardware and writing the hardware description (VHDL) to control a HD44780 LCD interface and output a few characters to the 16×2 LCD screen. To make things a little easier, we’ll use a familiar board, the CPLD Dev Board that I introduced a few years ago. It’s dated but still a good learning platform! ”

Posted March 1, 2012 by Chris

“In this article we explore the flexibilty and capability of FPGAs and specifically CPLDs for creating an RS232 serial interface. Our main goal will be to send ASCII codes from a PC to our CPLD Dev Board and display them on a 7 segment LED for verification. ”

Posted February 27, 2012 by Chris

“This project is an extension of interfacing microcontroller with hyperterminal and GSM module. The previous project explained a way to interface a GSM module with 8051 microcontroller where the information response and result codes received by the controller were sent back to computer to display them at HyperTerminal. In this project, the same output is displayed on a 16×2 LCD interface.”

Posted February 23, 2012 by Chris

“ This article will show you how to use standard electronics parts easily purchased at any electronics store to build your very own Altera FPGA and CPLD device programmer. The programmer will work flawlessly with Altera’s Quartus II software and take less than an hour to build. ”

Posted February 13, 2012 by Chris

“Often the biggest stumbling block to using alphanumeric LCD displays is the number of pins required to control them. For the Hitachi 44780, twelve pins are required from the MCU to interface to the display for it to work in eight bit mode. For many smaller MCU, twelve pins are not available or will be better served in the application. To be fair, this can be reduced to six by using the 44780’s “Four Bit” mode, but this can still be more than acceptable for most applications.”

Posted February 8, 2012 by Chris

“About 10 times a minute the controller poles each of the three I2C temperature sensors (DS1721) for it’s current temperature. The sensors are the eight pin SMT IC’s on the back of the boards. There is one on the main circuit board. There are two more sensors on the smaller boards. One of the smaller boards is screwed into the incoming air vent and the other is screwed into the vent on a backup AC unit.”

Posted February 5, 2012 by Chris

“In this project we turned an Altera Cyclone II FGPA into a simple video production unit with the help of a Sony Handycam and a PC for serial communication. The main focus of the project is the ability to provide a green screen effect, most commonly seen with weather news. We would extract the green regions of the video based on a threshold and display a background image, such as a weather map.”

Posted February 1, 2012 by Chris

“The SudoGlove is a gesture controller that can be easily interfaced with hardware or software via a wireless connection. The glove implements an array of sensors plus filtering circuitry and mathematical analysis firmware to derive state values for each sensor and transmits them to an authorized receiver. I have used the glove to drive an RC car, to synthesize music, to manipulate openGL video, to control arbitrary processing software, and to control performance lighting effects.”

Posted January 16, 2012 by Chris

“The idea of building an RS232 to Ethernet bridge seemed like a great way to begin learning about embedded system design. Having created a working sample, though it was left with my teammate after graduation, I decided to recreate the project with more features and higher reliability. The project was later renamed from ‘STEDS’ to ‘NI-1’ (Network Interface 1) and finally ‘Pack-it’. Pack-it is based on a Motorola MC9S12 MCU and a CS8900A Cirrus Ethernet controller.”

Posted January 6, 2012 by Chris

“The main goals of this project was to learn Verilog, to learn about buses and to create a platform for future projects which require the parallelism and/or exact timing of an FPGA combined with the ease of programming of a general purpose PC. An example of a future project is a programmable function generator. At the command of an application running on the PC, the FPGA can generate square waves or PWM signals to feed into a device under test.”