FPGA

This section contains miscellaneous hardware projects that I developed for FPGAs.

UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter)

While working on ρ-VEX, I needed more debugging-power than just a few LEDs on my FPGA board. I decided that I wanted to get debugging information on my PC. One way to get this, was by transmitting the data over a serial (RS-232) cable from the FPGA board to my PC. Of course, something had to actually transmit the data on the FPGA - that's where a UART comes into play. I could look for an open source IP core that I could use, but I decided to make one myself, as UARTs are not that complex.

The UART turned out to be very useful for me, and I made it publicly available through Google Code. An example/test system is included (uart_test).

Monotonic Jukebox

A workshop at the university showed a high-level design for a monotonic 'MIDI' synthesizer. I finished the implementation, and loaded the guitar intro of Dream Theater's song 'In The Presence of Enemies' into it. The result can be seen/heard in the video below.