Graphical User Interface project on Spartan-3 FPGA

[Simon Piekert]

I am a student of Electronics and I am going to do semester work on the
topic "Implementation of Graphical User Interfaces on an Embedded Platform".
We are allowed to choose a project of our own so this is why I am currently
looking for suitable project ideas. The work shall be implemented on a
Xilinx Spartan-3A/3AN Starter Kit Board, making use of the Microblaze CPU.

As most important features the board brings a Spartan-3A FPGA, a 50 MHz
crystal oscillator, 32Mx16 DDR2 SDRAM, 32 Mbit parallel Flash, a RS-232
serial port, PS/2-style mouse/keyboard port, a VGA video output port and
some push-buttons and switches.

I am not looking for an already finished solution to but I want to work it
out for myself. And first of all I want to learn some more things about
Microblaze programming on FPGA. The project must fit in the above mentioned
topic so if someone did something similar or has ideas how to combine the
GUI topic with FPGA Hardware / Software Co-Design then please send me
details of this.

Thanks in advance. Any ideas on this subject are really appreciated.

Simon

 

[Michael Metzner]

maybe this is interesting for you

http://www.genode-labs.com/produkte/fpga-graphics

 

[Chris Abele]

Keep in mind that most low-cost development boards have low-
functionality VGA ports. You can have red green and blue each
completely on or completely off, no 256 shades of gray per channel.
You can get several colors out of this but it's not much for a GUI.

Looks to me like the "Xilinx Spartan-3A/3AN Starter Kit Board" has
simple four bit resistor DAC for each color, which is to say sixteen
shades for each of R, G, B or 4096 possible colors. Not amazing, but
probably adequate for a student's GUI project.

 

[David L. Jones]

I am a student of Electronics and I am going to do semester work on
the topic "Implementation of Graphical User Interfaces on an Embedded
Platform". We are allowed to choose a project of our own so this is
why I am currently looking for suitable project ideas. The work shall
be implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3A/3AN Starter Kit Board, making
use of the Microblaze CPU.
As most important features the board brings a Spartan-3A FPGA, a 50
MHz crystal oscillator, 32Mx16 DDR2 SDRAM, 32 Mbit parallel Flash, a
RS-232 serial port, PS/2-style mouse/keyboard port, a VGA video
output port and some push-buttons and switches.

I am not looking for an already finished solution to but I want to
work it out for myself. And first of all I want to learn some more
things about Microblaze programming on FPGA. The project must fit in
the above mentioned topic so if someone did something similar or has
ideas how to combine the GUI topic with FPGA Hardware / Software
Co-Design then please send me details of this.

Thanks in advance. Any ideas on this subject are really appreciated.

Simon

How about implementing a game around the GUI system, like chess or
something?
I implemented Tom Kerrigan's TSCP Chess on a Spartan 3 pretty easily:
http://www.alternatezone.com/images/NanoChess.jpg
(it evetually had graphic pieces and nicer buttons)
http://www.tckerrigan.com/Chess/TSCP

Just an idea.

Dave.

 

[Uwe Bonnes]

How about implementing a game around the GUI system, like chess or
something?
I implemented Tom Kerrigan's TSCP Chess on a Spartan 3 pretty easily:
http://www.alternatezone.com/images/NanoChess.jpg
(it evetually had graphic pieces and nicer buttons)
http://www.tckerrigan.com/Chess/TSCP

Just an idea.

http://www.fpgaarcade.com/