I need to make a fpga module that can read and write to the ddr memory of the DE 10 standard fpga board. But I have no idea on where to start. Can some one please point me in a right direction.
Thank you.
Ideally you will take some demo project built for your exact board, and alter it accordingly to your needs.
The generic way - download the "SystemBuilder" sw from Terasic site (the manufacturer of the DE10 boards). Find your board, open "Resources" section and download needed stuff.
Run SystemBuilder, select the desired interfaces instantiated, including hard processor system. Systembuilder will create a template project with pin locations assigned.
Within your project run Qsys platform designer, instantiate the HPS core, configure the required interfaces (FPGA-to-HPS SDRAM Interface), fill in the settings for the sdram chips used. I can't remember if I've used some "Golden hardware reference design" project, but I had the needed numbers to configure ddr controller for exact chips on the other type of board (DE10-nano).
Run the tcl script "hps_sdram_p0_pin_assignments.tcl" to complete the ddr3 sdram pin assignment (standards applied, etc). On the fpga side then you'll have a memory-mapped interface, and you access ddr3 like it's just a static ram, but respecting the wait requests when controller asserts it.
It's very likely you'll find something pre-built in one of big archives present in "Resources" section on the Terasic site page for your board.
In any case, you'd better go through some tutorials on HPS instantiation, that's a huge topic, involving preparing the preloader that runs before linux, etc.
Related
I wrote a C++ program in Visual Studio for anomaly detection using OpenCV. I'm now able to capture images with Basler Ace camera and process the captured image in visual studio. Camera is connected to computer directly with USB 3.0.
My next step is to synchronize image capturing and processing with robot movement. I have IRB1440 ABB robot.
What are the possible solutions for this? Should I buy expensive Siemens PLCs ? Can the solution be found in any other way? What type of communication should I use?
This is a very specific question on a commercial product. I suggest you contact ABBs support and read the robot controllers manual. There you will find information on how to interface it in a safe manner.
It is not the robot you want to talk to, it is its controller!
According to the info I found on IRB 1440 (seem to be a sub-model of IRB1400) the controller is a S4Cplus.
The way we usually do it is a Windows PC based image processing system that is hooked up to a PLC (Siemens, Mitsubishi,...) which forwards our coordinates, angles and whatnot to the robot controller.
Of course the PLC can be omitted if your PC is the "boss" of the entire system.
S4Cplus Product Specifications
This controller comes with various interfacing options including RS232, RS422, Ethernet as well as a whole bunch of industry standards.
Having a separate PLC is not necessary as the controller may serve as a PLC itself, although you might have to upgrade the controller using so called I/O nodes.
But as I said, refer to the manuals and ABB support.
Obviously any non-realtime solution like a Windows PC is not an option for any safety features.
I'm new to using VHDL and have run into an issue with my project. I'm trying to make an FPGA to converts from one communication protocol to a different one, and for this purpose it would be useful to be able to store (hopefully multiple) packets before converting.
Before I tried to store this data in arrays, but it became quickly apparent that this takes up far too much space on the FPGA. Therefore, I have been searching for a way to store the data on the DDR3 ram on the SP605 board (http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/boards_and_kits/xtp067_sp605_schematics.pdf, page 9). I however cannot find instructions on how to write or read data from this. I'm trying to store one 8bit std_logic_vector per clock cycle to later be accessed.
Can anyone advise me on how to proceed?
Xilinx offers an IP Core generator. This IP catalog contains a Memory Interface Generator (MIG) which generates an IP Core to access different memory types. Configure this core for DDR3.
Writing a DDR3 controller in VHDL is not a project for a beginner not even for an experienced designer.
The state machine is simple and well known, but the calibration logic is very costly.
You should consider a caching or burst read/write technique, because DDR memory can not be accessed in every cycle.
I can't seem to find a good comprehensive list of available ioctls for netbsd.
I am looking to do some operations on harddisk (getting size, physical sector size, model). I have the code working in linux. It looks something like this, I removed errors etc to make it more compact:
ioctl(fileno(driveptr[i]),HDIO_GET_IDENTITY,&hd);
ioctl(fileno(driveptr[i]),BLKGETSIZE64,&drivesize[i]);
ioctl(fileno(driveptr[i]),BLKPBSZGET,&psztemp);
Is there an equivalent to these ioctls in netbsd?
regards
The driver source for a given type of disk interface (or any other kind of device driver) is probably the best canonical place to find device specific ioctls.
NetBSD at a systems level, like many unix-based systems, tries hard to avoid being hardware specific, even in terms of providing detailed hardware specific information to user level. The goal of unix, after all, is to provide a system that is uniform across a wide variety of hardware platorms, not to provide detailed low-level access to specific hardware. The very best you can get in terms of hardware specific details is the information printed by the drivers at boot time about the hardware as it is probed and attached.
At a more generic level you can basically only get disk and partition labels -- i.e. information pertinent to the way the system presents disk devices to userland. Unfortunately the only driver manual page that documents these is sd(4) (cd(4) has some more detail about more ioctls specific to cd-rom devices). scsi(4) documents bus-level ioctls for SCSI and ATAPI interfaces.
On x86 platforms there's "sysctl machdep.diskinfo" (and the equivalent C level interface via sysctl(3)) to get details about what the BIOS reported about the disks it knew about at boot time, but that may be incomplete.
I've been searching for some information regarding microcontroller programming but the info I find is either way over my head or doesn't appear to exist. I'm looking for something easier to digest! I'm relatively new to programming and come from an SQL DBA background and decided that it would be quicker for me to learn some programming fundamentals and then teach myself Delphi than it would to get some changes implemented through my company's insane design change note system!
After a couple of years of Delphi programming I can cope with writing database applications without too much bother and I want to be able to move on a level.
We use PIC microcontrollers on our PCBs; mainly the PIC18F family. The software on the PICS is written in C but there are parameters values that are written to by a Delphi application that interface with the PIC using an ActiveX control.
Basically, SQL Database holds parameter info, Delphi client app retrieves those values, passes them to the ActiveX controll which does all the low level stuff on the PIC. For example the internal EEPROM will have a map and within any particular address a value will be stored to switch something on or off or hold an integer value etc.
I've gotten hold of an MPLAB kit which has an ICD2 device that can read and write values to the internal EEPROM and I understand how to change these hexadecimal values using MPLAB software.
My hope isn't to learn embedded microcontroller programming; rather that I can write a Delphi app that will do something similar to MPLAB software. E.g read and write values to certain memory addresses within the EEPROM.
I'd be very gratefull if anyone can point me in the right direction of any libraries or components that may already exist for bridging this gap between simple Delphi form application and writing low level PIC EEPROM. I doubt such any easy interface exists but I thought I'd ask. To summarise I want to be able to have a simple form app, with some edit boxes that the user types in or selects from dropdown boxes, parameter values, to click on a button and to assign those parameter values to specific EEPROM memory addresses. Thank you for reading and any comments would be gratefully received.
Regards
KD
I'm a big fan of MikroElectronika and have used their Pascal tools for pic16 series MCU with great success (touch screen interfaces, ZigBee, ...).
http://www.mikroe.com/
Updated 2015 Answer:
Why not a Raspberry Pi with FreePascal and Lazarus? The boards cost from $5 to $25 US, as of this date, and the development tools are free.
Original 2012 Answer:
If you like to use Pascal, you might find Free Pascal useful on small embedded systems, but the minimum I believe you will find it can compile on is a Linux-based ARM embedded system. The fact that you use pascal on both sides is very unlikely to help you accomplish anything major.
If you want to go all the way down the the smallest PIC microcontrollers, you'll find that it's almost always a variant of C that you'll be using. Frankly, at that level, the differences aren't that much. If you can write Pascal, you can learn enough C in a day, to use with microcontrollers.
Don't be scared to use the native language that most microcontrollers support. My personal favorites are the Rabbit microcontrollers, formerly from Z-World, now from digi -- I think I paid about $100 US for the first board and development toolkit.
Interfacing such an application with delphi is pretty easy, usually these days, I would interface using TCP/IP over either wired Ethernet, or wireless (Wifi). But if you really want to you could use RS-232 or RS-485 serial links. (RS-485 has the advantage that you can wire it up to 5 miles long.) If I was using a serial link, I'd probably implement something like Modbus on both sides, if I just wanted to send some numeric data back and forth, and if I was doing something text-oriented, I think I'd write a mini HTTP web server on the embedded controller, and most boards these days come with enough HTTP server demos to make that drop-dead easy.
Delphi outputs Win32 and Win64 native applications you can write software that can interact with certain devices if the PCB has serial comunication or I2C you can write software that in Delphi that it will interact with the physical device.
But if you want to programm the devices yourself , write software that will run on this devices you can't do it in Delphi. I suggest you buy an Arduino it's an excellent envoirment for beginners in microcontroller programming.
If you have the source code of your pic microcontroller then you can implement the code in C to read from Serial, USB or some other interface available in your hardware and write it to the eeprom. This way its easy to write the app in any high level language like delphi, c++, etc.
Or you can write your PIC application using the mikropascal compiler from mikroeletronika that its very good and I've been using for a long time, but as you can see you will have to implement some mecanism to read from the interface and write to your eeprom as I've mentioned before.
This compiler comes with a lote of librarys to work with many devices. You should take a look on it, its not free but the price is low and in their site you can find samples and sample boards to test it.
One option, if you want a simple interface to write to the PIC EEPROM, is to use the ICD command line utility. Unfortunately it is not available for the ICD2, but the PICkit 2 and 3 (which are cheap), ICD3, and RealICE have command line utilities that give you the ability to write to the EEPROM (google pk2cmd). In Delphi, you could just wrap a very simple set of command line calls to pk2cmd.
My and my fellow students are deciding on a choosing a simple microcontroller to do very basic image processing. We are basically trying to implement template matching to find a set of objects in specific portions of the image. We'd like to use a connect a webcam to the microcontroller to do the job take the pictures and look for the objects. We also require basic wireless communication (e.g. bluetooth or wifi).
I don't think we will have the luxury of using state-of-the-art microcontroller, but something thats been around for a while (due to budget and stuff). Could anyone please advise on which specs of the microcontrolelr would be the most relevant for the above task (e.g. CPU, MIPS, etc).
Thanks a lot!
For this kind of a task, I would say the amount of RAM is the most relevant spec.
A microcontroller with an external memory interface allows you to extend the data space with additional SRAM to hold your image data.
Also note, that memory is needed for any protocol stacks you need to implement (Bluetooth, TCP/IP even more so).
You probably want to have total RAM in tens of kilobytes, preferably 100+ kB.
It is also nice to have plenty of program memory available when learning and experimenting. Later on you can try to optimize and squeeze your code into a more confined device.
As for the architecture, choose something you can easily find development tools and examples for.ARM, AVR and PIC are all good candidates among others.
Also find out what interfaces you need to use to
control the camera (e.g. I2C or SPI)
read pixel data (e.g. parallel or analog)
Connecting directly to a webcam's USB interface would not be a straightforward task, as the microcontroller would need to act as a USB host.
Good luck with your project!
You may need a microcontroller with following features:
USB 2.0 Host controller
1.2MB of memory for buffer 640*480*2(bytes per pixel)*2(double buffer)
(you may use lower resolution if there are not enough memory)
Wifi controller
CPU power strong enough for your task
Ready open source code
It seems that broadcom controllers may be useful here.
Also, you can by off-the-shell Wifi router with usb port and use it for your project
(i.e. Linksys E3000 )