fpga4fun.com

I am working on a final project in a class that is required to graduate. The group's design is to create a positioning system based off of radio frequency and RSSI. The part I am researching is the electronic processing unit. Now I am curious to see what some people think is the best route to go. I have looked at spartan 3 fpga's but the price may be too high. All the board would have to do is store two look up tables (rssi and arctan) have some adders to calcuate the coordinates and be able to output to a LCD. Any opinions on how to approach this problem would be great seeing as the only FPGA work i've done is coding in verilog.

Hi,

Well, if you know Verilog, and you have a good feel for how digital electronics works, then that's all you need to start using FPGAs. Look-up tables can be programmed with a case statement. You'll need a state machine to drive the LCD. The KNJN boards are not expensive.

But do you really need the power of an FPGA for this project? A microcontroller, e.g. PIC or AVR/Arduino, might be easier to program [that's 3 of these in a row now!]. You can probably find a microcontroller experimentation board that has the I/Os that you need.

Nick

NickH wrote:
But do you really need the power of an FPGA for this project? A microcontroller, e.g. PIC or AVR/Arduino, might be easier to program

Nick

I definitely agree that a microcontroller would be easier for your application. Buy a serial-LCD that's easy to drive. Like this one

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc ... cts_id=461

I will say I'm partial to Parallax's microcontrollers, like the SX28. While it's not as popular as the PICs/ATMELs, they have a nice basic "assembler." The language is super simple and you can intermix assembly with the basic, using the right language for the right task. Parallax's uC's are also much faster, because most instructions are single-cycle, and they run at 50mhz (so 50 mips).

HTH

Keith