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M. Rathmair, F. Bauer, M. Meisel:
"LightClockV2 - A Motivation for Teaching Scalable Digital Hardware Design";
Talk: 2018 IEEE 27th International Symposium on Industrial Electronics (ISIE), Cairns, Australia; 06-13-2018 - 06-15-2018; in: "Proceedings 2018 IEEE 27th International Symposium on Industrial Electronics (ISIE)", IEEE, Cairns, QLD, Australia (2018), ISSN: 2163-5145; 917 - 922.

Learning embedded design can be achieved with simple standard applications and microcontrollers but to spark interest in the topic, to pursue digital hardware design, motivation of students is a key factor demanding new approaches. One of which is presented in this paper as the LightClockV2, a fancy LED-based visualization gadget, built from 60 RGB color LEDs mounted on a circular PCB board to generate radial light beams. For focusing beams, we used laser pointer lenses which are mounted and adjusted in 3D printed holders. A main challenge of the project was the generation of 180 individually controllable pulse width modulation (PWM) signals. Characteristics as a 100 kHz PWM frequency, expandability for other visualization applications and a full single chip solution tighten the project requirements. In an implementation perspective a FPGA based solution efficiently provides an appropriate computational unit (finite state machine) generating light patterns, and 180 PWM peripheral modules. However, the FPGA implementation is a powerful and high-performance realization of this application and faces significant advantages in contrast to a classical microcontroller-based solution.

Embedded systems design, FPGA clock, light patterns

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISIE.2018.8433817

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_277428.pdf