Hello everyone. Today it is deadline of 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 FPGA. Today I completed quiz (with one mistake made) and post blog post about my project. My performance in this competition is not as good as I originally expected. It was mainly caused by lack of free time. As part of competition, I originally promised image processing application featuring camera. As part of competition, I decided to design PCB but after receiving it I found many bugs, so I decided to through it away. I was disappointed since this moment but in position alternative project (RC6 encryption) was also attractive to me and I did its enthusiasm (which I did not expected at the time when I was very sad with my PCB for original project).
As part of competition, I completed following tasks:
Following list contains links to my blog posts:
- Received Arty-S7 Board (Introduction blog)
- RC6 cipher implemented in Verilog (First project)
- Misaz’s Spartan 7 Competition Summary Blog (this blog)
I did not finish my sensor addition. Because I had to change project plan, I also had to reinvent some idea about sensor. After some time of thinking I planned to add I2C temperature sensor to my encryption engine for checking running out of allowed temperature range. As an experiment I planed test this addition with hot air gun. But I was unable to complete this at time. I planed implement I2C driver for MAX31875 temperature sensor in Verilog, but I implemented it only partially and time went out.
Conclusion
While my performance in competition was not good, I still learned some new things. I also learnt form my failed PCB design and hopefully I will not make the same mistakes next time. I thank element14 and Xilinx for opportunity to play with Arty S7 board and organising this incredible contest. It is nice board. I like its simple design. It has almost no onboard peripherals like sensors but have lot of connectors and PMODs which allows you to connect there whatever you want. I like this approach. Leds, switches and buttons are useful when working with FPGA and I used them for debugging. My only notice about board is that its reference manual does not mention pinout of Arduino connector pins and I had to search for them in schematics.
