FPGA Project for Senior Design

[M Boat]

Hello,

I am in the early stages of a picking/planning a senior design project. The first semester is picking a project, then defining a plan as to how to execute the design idea. The second semester is executing the plan made in the first semester, then presenting the project at the end of the second semester. Then I get to graduate. YAY!

The problem is I don't know what I want to do. Well, not entirely true. I want to do a LabView project using an FPGA chip. More defined, the problem is I don't know what I want to do with that. B/c I know that a Labview programmed FPGA is just a software controlled piece of hardware, it needs to do something. What to make it do is what I am having trouble deciding or distinguishing.

I am looking for an idea that can be accomplished in that time frame of a 16 week semester. Anyone?

I have a light Labview background, but I have resources/people that can help me.

I have available to me at my college Alterra FPGA boards DE1 and DE2, using the Cyclone 2 chip. Can Labview be programmed on this equipment?

Can anyone help me?

Thanks,

Mike

[M Boat]

Anyone?

[nathand]

The only FPGAs that LabVIEW can target are the ones in NI's products, so programming your school's boards is unfortunately not an option.

[charris]

Mike:

There's one additional option that may or may not be helpful.

You can target the Spartan 3E with LabVIEW FPGA, but the driver is only licensed for academic use. If you can get your hands on one of those, then it might be your lucky day

More info:

Using LabVIEW FPGA with the Xilinx SPARTAN-3E XUP Starter Kit

LabVIEW FPGA Module Training for Xilinx Spartan 3E XUP Hardware

[M Boat]

That it is a great little nugget of information. 🙂

One of my instructors told me that, the engineering department (EE) (I am in EET) had the Xilinx FPGA boards. Now I just have to find out which one(s). Thanks, Caleb.

Then I still need to come up with an idea of what to make it do.

thanks,

Mike

[GregFreeman]

Not to bust your bubble or deter you from this, but I have to ask how much LabVIEW experience you have? If this is your first LabVIEW project, taking on FPGA is an incredibly bold task! Best of luck, but remember FPGA compile times are longer, development is not quite as simple as programming in LabVIEW on Windows due to having to use fixed point math, limited array and cluster use (if you don't want long compile times), and just needing to be very resource conscious in general or else you will wake up to see your code still trying to compile  . Like I said, I don't want to deter you from this, and I respect the ambitiousness, I just feel it's important to know what may lie ahead!

[M Boat]

The labview experience I have:

I have been through a 16 week class of Labview that had 6 in depth labs requiring weeks to finish the lab

I work with Labview 3 days a week for my part time job, been doing this for about 2.5 -3 months.

I have literally until the end of November to have this working. So, time I am not too much worried about. This semester is actually the planning phase of the design project. Next fall semester is the time to implement the plans that are being made now. If I am adventuresome enough, maybe I can work on this also over the summer.

I would say if you are warning me about the size and scope of this project, would you have any other suggestions for a labview senior design project? I am still looking for ideas on what to do with this once it is programmed. It really does me no good to just have a software controlled piece of hardware that does nothing.:)

[GregFreeman]

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@M Boat wrote:

I work with Labview 3 days a week for my part time job, been doing this for about 2.5 -3 months.  

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Exactly how I started 3 years ago (part time job at school) . The classes I saw at Purdue were usually just dropping express VIs though. Hopefully they went more in depth in your classes. I was always pushing for that in college with regards to LabVIEW because I felt many of the classes were lacking the real substance of the IDE.

I think it sounds like you'll be fine. Besides, often learning on the fly with trial and error and not much of a time constraint I find to be much more effective than sitting in a classroom listening to a lecturer show you how it should be done. Best of luck and let us know how it turns out. Make sure as you chug along, post some VIs to get advice. I always found that most helpful. Don't wait until you finish the program to post and ask "how could this be better". Because, if it needs to be rearchitected, you're in a jam. I would post maybe once a week and include your VI/Project to get advice. It may just be the type of learner I am, but being critqued like this when I had time to go back and change things to make them better was greatly helpful in picking up good programming practices.

[M Boat]

I have now have in my possession the Xilinx Spartan 3E Development kit. Turns out one of my instructors had one in his office.

Doing research to find out what I can do with an FPGA. More to come...

Thank you. I agree with learning on the fly.

I will have a Purdue BSEET when I graduate in December. But attending their Fort Wayne, IN campus. The class there was a lot more than dropping in express vi's. It was deep in depth labs, we had to generate an array, using a flat sequence, using 2 different kinds of graphs with labeling, and for loops, formula nodes, case structures, all kinds of fun stuff. We had a lab where we had to calculate all sides of an irregular tetrahedron, that was painful.

[nathand]

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@M Boat wrote:

I would say if you are warning me about the size and scope of this project, would you have any other suggestions for a labview senior design project? I am still looking for ideas on what to do with this once it is programmed. It really does me no good to just have a software controlled piece of hardware that does nothing.:)

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How about some sort of audio processing?  You could start with generating a single frequency, then expand that into multiple notes or harmonics, or do some sort of processing on incoming audio (pitch shifting, reverb??).  I have no idea of the level of difficulty of this, since it's well outside my area of expertise (that's probably why I think it's a neat project).