FPGA Project.

[jrz126]

Hi Gang,

I need some ideas for a final project for my advanced digital class...(Note that I am just looking for ideas and not a solution, so please dont harass me

I'm an electrical engineer major but I'm going for a 2nd major in computer engineering. So being a EE, I'm looking to interface some sort of hardware to the FPGA...Motors, LEDs, etc.

I'm kinda leaning towards an inverted Pendulum, but I'm sure there are plenty of other cool projects out there.

Any Suggestions?

The FPGA is a Xilinx Spartian II.

 

[The Mad Professor]

This caught my eye. A variation on the theme of the inverted pendulum,
similiar in many ways to Segway and yet it poses some intruiging new problems.

 

[kamdy]

I Suggest the following two Ideas
1-Digital storage oscilloscope
2-Moving message display

 

[hjames]

LCD or OLED displays are always fun to build into a project - having a nice human readable interface makes projects more "hands-on."

RC servo's are dead easy to interface to, and you don't have to do any funny analog business.

Input devices are also interesting - PS2 mice and keyboards have well documented protocols, so implementing those are also a nice add-on.

 

[koduvayur2001]

Why dont' you try a digital LED based moving display which would be a small weather station displaying wind speed, amount of rainfall, temperature and levels of ambient pollution interspaced with date and time of the location?

 

[jrz126]

Thanks for all the suggestions...
I was thinking about doing something involving LEDs but the Prof said he wanted something that requires quite alot of computations.

I think I'm going to do the inverted pendulum. I have all of the parts necessary, (4+ years of saving electronics junk is finally paying off). So I just have to do the programming.
Unfortunitly we only have 3 weeks left of classes, so I'll probably be spending quite a bit of time in the labs to get it done.

 

[JimB]

How about a motor condition monitor.

Displays stuff such as supply volts, current, power factor, rotational speed, running hours, number of starts, winding temperature, bearing temperature.
You could put alarms on some of these parameters.
Display the data on an LCD display, hand the data off to some other SCADA type system.

JimB