LED Blinking (FPGA)

[Obnauticus]

Hey,

I recently got this FPGA (Spartan 3E Starter Board) and I am trying to blink an LED at 10Hz using LabView kind of like a "hello world" type thing. I've tried a lot of stuff including square wave generation, however the furthest I've gotten is turning the LED on, I've never been able to blink it at 10Hz. I was wondering how one would go about doing this, possibly with an example or reference attached.

Thankyou in advance!

Obnauticus

[DanRichards]

HI Obnauticus,

How are you accomplishing the square wave generation? Where are you writing the program? Are you programming the FPGA or trying to control the output in the host VI? Can you take a screenshot of your project?

Assuming you're writing your code in the FPGA VI, are you able to wire an array of booleans (one true, one false) into the FPGA output node and then set your while loop to execute at 10Hz?

I look forward to your reply!

Regards,

[Obnauticus]

Hey,

I have managed to get it to work through trial and error, however I would like to be able to use the onboard controls that my FPGA dev board came with (i.e. N,S,W,E Buttons, slider switches, and etc.). I haven't found many resources online that detail the use of such items. I also would like to use the onboard LCD screen on my FPGA with LabVIEW, but also haven't found many resources (this would be for user feedback, so I can tune the blink frequency with the onboard controls instead of using the controls within LabVIEW's UI).

Thank you in advance,

~obnauticus

[DanRichards]

Hi Obnauticus,

The digital controls for the starter board show up just like DIO lines would for any RIO module. In your LV project, navigate to your FPGA target and select the input you want to drag into your FPGA VI. Then use those outputs to program your FPGA VI.

Just to give you a heads-up, those triggers are not de-bounced. That means you could get several rising edges per press of each button due to bouncing. That will require some experimentation on your part to handle multiple triggers, triggering problems, etc. LED's are just digital outputs. The names of those DIO channels should correspond to the names printed on the starter board.

Please let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks!