Starting

Embedded systems are everywhere.  A digital watch, microwave oven, electronic toy, and your car dashboard are a few disparate examples.  The characteristics of an embedded system are:

• Made from a combination of hardware and software
• Task specific. They’re designed to perform one specialized task as opposed to general purpose computers
• Usually reactive or feedback-oriented.  E.g. most home or kitchen appliances only function when you interact with them.
• Built with efficiency and frugality.  Your toaster needs a timer and heat control, but it really doesn’t need a full-fledged CPU
• Should be reliable and stable.  Because they are simple, we expect these machines to work. They shouldn’t require maintenance because it’s often easier and cheaper to buy a new one.

For my required EE Hardware design project, my team developed an embedded system on an Atlys Spartan-6 Development Board.  This board constructs your hardware specification, like an FPGA, but then it can also run C software that you place on top of the hardware.

My brother’s Flat Stanley visited me while I was working in the EE lab.  Sadly, I couldn’t find a photo of our finished project, but this is our Spartan-6 Development Board

We hooked up a webcam, a screen, and speakers to our Board.  We had the screen display the camera’s output.  Our game consisted of these playable modes:

1. Changes the chord’s duration based on the red/blue/green content of the overall pixel count.
2. Changes the chord based the amount of movement detected by the camera.
3. A grid is overlaid on the screen. When a user in front of the camera covers a square of the grid with their hand, the board plays a song.

Skills:

•  Verilog code in Xilinx Platform Studio configures the processor-based system.  [The hardware platform managed the transfer of data from the camera to the screen.  All the song data was also implemented in hardware.]
•  C programming in Xilinx Software Development Kit.  [Everything else:  the music player, game controls, game logic, pixel computations were done in software.]

Key Takeaway:    This project was a turning point: creating the hardware infrastructure was important, but the software was the crux of the game! My specialty was more on the hardware side and I realized that I shouldn’t leave college without delving into the software domain.

DJ mode allows user to mash these pop songs together based on where one’s hand is positioned in the screen’s grid.

This entry was posted on July 1, 2015 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Gaming, Hardware, Music, Software. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.