This assignment was an introduction to the UART communication protocol, but sending and recieving data.
Task 1:
Task one was to create
a program that countes the number of button presses using a
debounce module and displays this count (from 0-9) on the seven segment
display. ` Figure 1: Button counter SSD code
Figure2: Button counter SSD demonstration
Task 2:
Task two was to modify the
code from task one to transmit ASCII characters to the serial port of
the connected computer. These ASCII character values are increased by
one every button press.
Figure 3: UART Tx sending to serial monitor code
Figure 4: UART Tx sending to serial monitor demonstration.
Task 3:
Task three was to take
input from the serial monitor of the connected computer rather than
outputting to the serial monitor. The ASCII code is displayed on the
first eight LEDs of the FPGA board, while the parity and error bits
being LEDs 8 and 9 respectively, and the rest of the LEDs being a
counter of how many times data has been recieved.
Figure 5: UART Rx recieving from serial monitor code.
Figure 6: UART Rx recieving from serial monitor demonstration.
Task 4:
Task four was to combine
tasks one and three, creating a program that takes input from the
serial monitor of the connected computer and displays the corisponding
number (0-9) on the seven segment display. The top module below uses
the same UART Rx control module as in task three. Figure 5: Recieving from seerial monitor and outputting to SSD code.
Figure 6: Recieving from seerial monitor and outputting to SSD demonstration.
Discussion:
This assignment gave me an
introduction to the UART commmunication protocol. Though the assignment
were straight forward, I had an issue where my FPGA board would return
an error for the LEDs for numbers 3, 5, 6 and 8 from the serial
monitor. I still do not know what caused this, and the problem fixed
itself the morning after when I reprogrammed the board. Overall I
feel more confdent dealing with communication protocols in the future,
and it was really cool to program what I had used in Arduino projects
many times
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