Great Website

[wuchy143]

I just want to say that this site is absolutely amazing and is a huge resource for lots of people around the world. I've been on here for a few years and just became a supporter. There are some very talented people on here and I must bow in respect. Thanks to all of you for your support in the love I have in electronics. Some of the knowledge I've sucked up from here is priceless. It truly is. Thanks.

-mike

 

[BrownOut]

How are those FPGA projects coming? Did you get your microblaze up and running? I've been working with Altera Nios since we last communicated.

 

[wuchy143]

Hey Brownout,

Impressed. You remember They are going well. I wish they I was spending more time on them but despite that I have successfully ran microblaze into one of Xilinx's FPGA's. It was a softcore micro. Was able to get it to say hello world(on my computer screen) and then hit a brick wall. I quickly realized that I have a weakness which is programming any micro for that matter Or programming in general. I noticed that if I wanted to drive the Ferrari of Electronics I need to address my weakness and squash it. So I put down the FPGA for a bit and did some simple projects programming micro's. Got familiar with C and how powerful it can be.

Some of the projects include an Hour Meter. Believe it or not I used it at work on a product I designed for the military. I used a PIC12F675 and interfaced it to an LCD. Every minute it sends out a few serial bytes to the LCD to update it. Every hour it saves data in EEPROM. Quite the learning experience. Especially thinking of ways so that EEPROM doesn't get trashed given certain conditions. That was really cool. Simple but good.

I'm currently working on a capacitive sensing trackball. I used MikroElektronika's libraries to get the USB bus up and running. They make it pretty simple because if I had to write all my USB stuff alone without libraries I'd be there for years and why re-invent the wheel? I've been able to get the PIC(PIC18F46J50) to read the quadrature encoding that I do on my current designs. This is so the PIC can sense movement. I have also been able to get the capacitive sensing to work. It's actually really cool because this specific chip I chose already has cap sense hardware inside it.(This is where my hardware experience helps ) So all I had to do was read the datasheet to initialize the hardware how I need it and waalaaa. I was able to sense me touching a pad and view it on my computer. Cool to say the least. My problem is when I weld all those parts together my T.B stinks. Doesn't work right so my "system" seems like it needs to be fixed. I will need to time things out correctly to not have tasks running into each other. I put that project down for a little and just picked the FPGA's up again. I just can't stay away from them. If I could get on an FPGA team with mixed experience engineers I'd be the happiest geek around hahaha. I'm working on it. I'll get there.

What type of projects are you working with Altera's Nios? Is that Nois II? I'm very weak with Altera and I need to start learning about their technology. What types of projects have you been doing? I really would like to start doing some real world projects with FPGA's so I have ammunition during my interviews. Just saying I like FPGA's clearly wont cut it. Got any projects that you can throw my way? It seems like not many people know much about FPGA's...which is odd to me so I"m not really sure what projects engineering managers would like to see. Maybe people on here can guide me?

 

[BrownOut]

Sounds like good progress on the microcontroller stuff. That's the great thing about the uC's; alot of the work is already done for you. I had to put down my personal FPGA projects to focus on my 'paying' job. Yes, I'm using Nios II and SOPC builder to create a communications system that includes Ethernet, PCIe, UART, DDR3 memory and a couple custom designs. I was also weak on Altera, but all it took was for me to read, read, read, read... I have a simple program ( Hello Wrold ) running, and I expect to expand it to a set of diagnostics soon. The 'real' programming is being done by a 'real' programmer. I just want to be able to test the system before I hand it off. Someday, I can get back to the interesting projects I was doing with my Xinlinx dev kit. I had a simple logic analyzer on my drawing board, and some custom interfaces. Oh well, I gotta pay the bills!

 

[wuchy143]

Yes. I'd have to agree on the paying job trumping fun projects at home. It stinks really because after a day of design or whatever coming home and working more doing the same sort of stuff my brain just shuts down and shows me who's boss. But I guess if you want to be good at what you do this is well....what you do. My main drive though is I'm bored where I work and need to get a bigger base of knowledge so I'm more content. That helps a lot.

hahah read read read. So right. There is a verilog tutorial online that I've read like 5 times and keep going back to it. You've probably seen it. Whoever wrote it did a great job. Verilog Tutorial I still need to learn VHDL as I haven't really touched on that at all. Just another hole I need to fill. What HDL are you most comfortable with?

Comm system sounds interesting. Maybe I'll do some reading and try to do some type of ethernet comm system. We'll see. I just baught **broken link removed** Should be at my place soon. Cannot wait to start with it. It specifically is made for using microblaze and comes with a lot of reference designs which I can hopefully leverage.

Yeh it's funny because I don't think people realize that programming is truly an art. It's more than just loops and functions. Making your code bulletproof is quite a daunting task. The firmware guy where I work is a true programmer as well. He rips me for my coding style which is getting better. He used to work for 3M Touch Systems doing F.W for touchscreens and what not. Pretty cool stuff.

work time. later

 

[BrownOut]

Hi again. Good point about doing what you do to be better at what you do... I've worked with a few engineers who are naturals at what they do, and don't seem to need to get theirselves any extra training. I"m not one of those guys. I have to go through the process and get some 'hands on' experience to be able to perform. One reason I started working with the kits is because most of my experience was in ASIC's, and I wanted to make the change to FPGA's ( because there are more jobs and it's more interesting to be able to 'see' what your designs are doing ) I am far more comfortabel with Verilog, though VHDL is probably a superior, though much more complicated, language. I also work with SystemC for simulations. System Verilog is coming along too, and I"m gonna need to hunker down and learn it soon. My problem in working in multiple languages, as well as a number of programming languages, is trying to remember all the syntax. I make use of many references, some of which I made on my own, to get me through. Wish I had a better memeory for them though.

When I started the new job last July, the learning curve was so steep that I didn't think I had any bandwidth left at the end of the day. Now things are beginning to settle down, so I think I can take on a couple more challenges. I've been working with a Spartan-3 board that I bought online from Digilent. It's a nice, fully featured board, if just a little obsolete -- the Spartan, not the other stuff. How are you able to work with Microblaze? When I checked, it required a license, and that was pretty expensive. Are you using the 1-month free license? I figured it would take me a month just to get started, so I never went down that road. Alter offers a program that allows you to use their IP in a 'teathered' mode; it will work as long as your board is teathered to a PC, otherwise, it will work on a time-limited baises, usually 1 hour and then you have to re-configure your device. Let me know becuase I'd like to play with the Microblaze if I can. I see it uses the Eclipse development environment, which is the same as Altera uses, so that would be good.