[Dprglist] FPGAs in robots

[Thalanayar Muthukumar]

Sure Carl.
I will ping you.

Regards.
- Kumar

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 24, 2021, at 6:03 PM, Carl Ott <carl.ott.jr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Kumar - nicely done!
> 
> I'm looking forward to comparing your hardware based implementation concepts with the traditional microprocessor/ software based ones. Sounds like a cool bake off!  As much as I like to build stuff, it seems like one can cover more ground by living vicariously through others' exploits :-) 
> 
> I always enjoyed getting FPGA designs to work and work - same could probably be said of software, but there's something about a hardware design that seems less likely to crash or hang.  And speed - ooo la la!  Back in the day It was really something to run 'complicated' logic circuits at 40 MHz.  Nowadays - you could sample RF straight at the analog amplifier, and do everything from there to baseband in digital -> why not - grab an FPGA and do multi-protocol SDR. There's probably several FPGA libraries for that - maybe even open sourced libraries...
> 
> Ping my email if you like and we can catch up sometime.
> 
> Meanwhile - looks like I have homework to skim through a video, and revisit the difference between Verilog and what I saw years back...
> 
> Cool!
> 
> Carl
> 
> 
>> On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 5:51 PM Thalanayar Muthukumar <tnkumar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wow Carl. You have had a wealth of FPGA experience.
>> 
>> Yesterday, I had my first hands on experience with FPGA on the ICEstick following Shawn Hymel’s video and got 5 LEDs on.
>> 
>> https://youtu.be/gtkQ84Euyww
>> 
>> <image0.jpeg>
>> 
>> 
>> I have this feeling that possibly 2 channel encoder plus PID plus LIDAR based localization can be implemented on the FPGA.
>> 
>> I do not have the necessary FPGA experience to know whether I am in the right track.
>> 
>> I used Verilog and open source Apio tool chain as that is what Shawn used in his YouTube video.
>> 
>> Love to kick ideas around with you Carl. I have a lot to learn.
>> 
>> Regards.
>> - Kumar
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>>>> On Nov 24, 2021, at 5:17 PM, Carl Ott <carl.ott.jr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Hi Kumar,
>>> 
>>> FWIW - 
>>> 
>>> I considered myself quite good with FPGAs - 
>>> 
>>> Circa 1990 ~ 1997.
>>> 
>>> I coded relatively large (at the time) Xilinx and Altera FPGAs (e.g. 256 pins per device and thousands of gates) - and was able to run them at nearly full utilization and max speed over mil-spec temperature ranges - yet maintain pin assignments regardless of design changes...
>>> 
>>> I managed to do that with a mix of functional simulation and static timing analysis tools. At the time, that was using (ASIC focused) Mentor Graphics tools on SUN workstations (with mostly functional FPGA add-on tools)...
>>> 
>>> And then I veered away from that path when I moved to Nokia and learned to "design in PowerPoint" (teams/organizations/products/marketingAndProductLaunchCampaigns)..
>>> 
>>> I'm sure certain bits of that FPGA knowledge remain quite relevant - but - it's probably a safe bet to guess that a few things might have changed a little since then...
>>> 
>>> FWIW - after starting briefly via schematic entry, I quickly migrated to VHDL and highly recommend VHDL or similar language if you're interested. In retrospect, I imagine that coding hardware in VHDL could leverage quite similar / analogous design patterns to coding software in an asynchronous / event driven environment like node.js. That's a hypothesis I'd like to validate at some point...
>>> 
>>> I haven't yet hit a DPRG level robot target where I've seriously considered an FPGA. But I'm very interested to kick ideas around if you're willing...
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> Carl
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 4:46 PM Thalanayar Muthukumar via DPRGlist <dprglist at lists.dprg.org> wrote:
>>>> Has anyone used FPGAs in their robots?
>>>> I got myself an ICEstick to learn FPGAs and wanted to check if anyone in the group has experience with FPGAs.
>>>> 
>>>> Regards.
>>>> - Kumar
>>>> 
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
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