ECE 351
Digital Systems Design
Projects and Demos
Wei Gao
Spring 2016
1
Discussion
 Labs
 Monday 3:30pm – 5:30pm, Tuesday 2:00pm - 4:00pm
• MK 224
 Your presence is not required
 We encourage you to use your own computer for
labs/projects on your own time
 TA will be in the lab to help your programming problems
and check off your lab assignments
 Lab will open after the first lab assignment is announced
• Each of you will check out a Basys2 board from the TA when the
lab is open
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Project
 Group project 35%
 Proposal presentation 5%
 Midterm presentation/demo 7%
 Final presentation/demo 8%
 Final report 15%
 2 students per team
 Perform a system project
 Develop/integrate software or hardware
 Perform experiments on real systems
 Do a demo to the class
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Grading Criteria
 Project topic (30%)
 Technical depth and difficulty (20%)
 Novelty (10%)
 Technical approach (50%)
 Technical correctness and soundness (20%)
 Efficiency and reliability of approach (15%)
 Practical implementation and verification (15%)
 Presentation (20%)
 Organization and clarity (10%)
 Completeness of contents (10%)
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Project Topics
 Sensing and monitoring
 Collect data from the environment
 Figure out the project scale carefully
 Application
 Develop an interesting application
• Games & utilities
 Using sensors and/or actuators
 Cyber-physical systems
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Available Devices
 Diligent Basys 2 FPGA boards
 FPGA features 18-bit multipliers,
72Kbits of fast dual-port block RAM,
and 500MHz+ operation
 USB port for JTAG programming
• Convenient interaction with PC
• Easy debugging
 On-board voltage regulators that allow use of 3.5V-5.5V external
power supplies
 External devices: 8 LEDs, 4-digit seven-segment display, four
pushbuttons, 8 slide switches, PS/2 port, and a 8-bit VGA port
 Four 6-pin headers for user I/Os, and attaching Digilent Pmod™
accessory circuit boards
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Available Devices
 A large variety of external sensors/actuators that can
be connected to the FPGA board
 Digilent Peripheral Modules (pMods)
 http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPat
h=2,401&Cat=9
 We have a large variety of pMods available, but can also
satisfy your need of others
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Examples of Sensor Systems
 Flight turbulence recorder
 Using 3-D accelerometer to take streaming data during
flight: turbulence = burst change in Y and Z axis speed
 Locate turbulence with Garmin GPS
 Using Matlab for data analysis
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Examples of Sensor Systems
 Use the sensors to control your home appliances
 Light sensor: automatically control the room lighting
 Temperature sensor: automatically temperature control
with the air conditioning
 Ambience sensor: detection of intruders…
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Examples of Sensor Systems
 Urban sensing: CarTel Project by MIT
http://cartel.csail.mit.edu/doku.php
 Visualization of traffic conditions
 Mobile data transfer among sensor devices
 Combining WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular connectivity
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Some Demos of Student Projects in
the past
 Detect emergent braking of cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrcRtA0kg-w
 Parking garage monitoring system
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsNjjYtBiBQ
 Car surveillance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_VOPpB2deM
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Suggested Topics for Sensor Systems
 Data sources
 Light, temperature, humidity, motions, etc.
 Energy efficiency
 Energy usage monitoring for home/apartment
 Automobile system
 Headlight reminder
 Automatic highbeam
 Smart home
 Your own air humidifier
 Automatic light control
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Examples of Actuator Systems
 GPS Systems
 Device: GPS chip
 All kinds of possibilities if you have
access to the GPS data…
 Location tracking
 Combined with sensing applications to make the data
more practical
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Examples of Actuator Systems
 Motion detection/control systems
 Device: Two axis joystick
 Gyroscope
 Accelerometer
 Capture of human behaviors or
commands
 Use the input from joystick to control other devices
 Using both input and output interfaces with the FPGA
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Examples of Actuator Systems
 Multimedia systems
 Audio output
 LCD display
 What do you want to play with these
inputs/outputs?
 Combine them with the motion
sensors
 Mini-gaming???
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Focus of System Design
 Performance
 Accuracy, delay
 Overhead
 Power consumption
 Transmission/computational cost
 Complexity
 Be careful to control the complexity of your project
 Focus on a specific aspect of system design
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System Implementation over pMods
 Communicate with the Basys2 board via SPI or I2C
digital interface
 Operating the pMods
 Read/write data from/to device registers
• Data formatting
 Precise timing control
 A lot of online searching efforts are needed
 pMods documentation
 The TA will help you out!
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Milestones
 Team forming: 9am, Jan 28th
 Find your teammate in or after class
 I will randomly assign you to a team after that time
 Proposal presentation: 9am, Feb 11th
 Submission of an one-page project proposal
 Midterm presentation: 9am, Mar 22th and 24th
 Submission of a project midterm report of 3-5 pages
 Final presentation / demo: 9am, Apr 19th and 21th
 Final Report: before final exam
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Project Proposal
 Need to discuss with me before you decide
 Make appointment with me or come during my office
hours
 One proposal per team
 Presentation
 10 min presentation + 5 min questions
 Team members
 Project focus: what are you doing in this project?
 Project background: where do you start with?
 Project motivation: why do you do this?
 Project goals: what do you expect to accomplish and
learn?
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Project Report
 Recommended format as being a research paper
 Introduction
 Related Work
 Overview: motivation, problem formulation, basic idea
 System design
 Experimentation: your system setup, evaluation plan,
experimental data
 Discussions & conclusions
Proposal
Mid-term presentation
Final project report
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Advice
 Start early and work on it regularly!
 Discuss with me often for feedbacks and directions
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