pic: Custom Built Stopwatch

[abeD]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Cool project! I always liked those types of projects in college, though figuring out why it is broken quickly becomes a challenge with so many wires!

If you (or anyone else reading, for that matter) are interested in experimenting more with digital logic design, you should think about getting an FPGA development board. For those who don't know, an FPGA is a chip that you can download a digital circuit into. You draw a schematic using a program on your computer and then you can download that schematic into the FPGA. It's very cool since you get all the fun of designing a circuit without the hassle of dealing with stripping wires, breadboards, etc. Anyway if anyone is interested in this, check out https://digilent.us/sales/Product.cfm?Prod=pegasus. It's a nice little FPGA development board that has a nice set of IO devices onboard to play with. It's only $89 (I know, I know - that's a lot of $$$ for a high school or college student, but it's worth it if you're thinking about a computer engineering career) and it comes with the programming cable & power supply. All you need to do to get it going is download the software for free from Xilinx.

Yes I agree, in my digital design class we were all given these FPGA boards and had the experience of using Xilinx. Xilinx was alot of trouble in the beginning being that it would always crash (We use one of the older verisons for some reason...apparently the new one is VHDL only??) In any case the program is pretty good and you can get pretty complicated very quickly (The last lab we had to do took over 25 hours!!) If I still had my board I would take a pic and upload.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by abeD

apparently the new one is VHDL only??

It defaults to VHDL, but you can still do schematic design if you want. I've done it with the board I mentioned above. I haven't taken the time to learn VHDL yet and really I prefer the schematic at this point as it feels like I have a little more control over it. Of course, once you start to get really complicated designs then designing a schematic starts to become cumbersome or even impossible.

Check out http://home.freeuk.com/fpgaarcade/games.htm for an interesting application of FPGAs - these guys have recreated various old-school arcade hardware inside an FPGA. Pretty neat.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Check out http://home.freeuk.com/fpgaarcade/games.htm for an interesting application of FPGAs - these guys have recreated various old-school arcade hardware inside an FPGA. Pretty neat.

That sounds similar to my final project for my design of digital systems (senior level) course. It was a simple pong like game on an Altera development board. It used a standard monitor (640x480 and 8 colors), and a ps2 keyboard.

For the freshman level digital course, we did a counter/stopwatch on the same board.