This is great mobile robot project that was created and described by Jidan Al-Eryani in Masters Thesis. This is full Master Thesis with deep analysis and testing that may be interesting to read as it includes various areas like designing power, control and intelligence modules where one MCU wouldn’t be effective.

Project uses AVR Atmega128L microcontroller for performing basic functions like PC interfacing, Motion control, FPGA configuration, memory interfacing. All intelligence is left to FPGA Spartan-3 XC3S400-TQ144 which may be used for image recognition, machine learning and more. Have a nice reading.

This project was developed by Cornell university students. The idea of this FPGA game is is to catch the delicious BBQ meat balls with the help of a BBQ stick. Game is controlled with USB mouse which is connected to Altera DE2 Board.

VGA controller supports 640×480 pixel resolution, where each pixel uses 16 bits. So each image block require 256K words of RAM memory. All logical block is designed for Altera Cyclone II EP2C35F672C6 FPGA where only limitation was lack of RAM. Project source files can be downloaded here. Good source for learning FPGA.

I’ve found very interesting thesis on the internet written by John Beeckler at McGill University, Montreal. The research was about particle graphics simulation on FPGA graphics. Simulation results can be used for modeling water, cloth, explosion, fire, smoke and clouds behavior.

As usually computer modeling is done in software level, there is main limitation – calculation speed. Calculating at hardware level always gives better results but also gives a lack of flexibility what software can provide. But anyway for specific tasks like particle simulation FPGA running at 130MHz speed increases a performance by two orders of magnitude comparing to software methods. Even FPGA speed up a GPU processors for this task. Read whole thesis here.

Traffic warning system or so called TDDY(Traffic Data Display ) is a vehicle-mounted, receive-only traffic warning system designed by Dubravko Gacina. System may be used to minimize the risk of vehicle like like public buses, emergency response vehicles, cabs, delivery vehicles accidents. An ATmega128 microcontroller and a matrix of 512 bi-color LEDs organized as a map of the Los Angeles freeways comprise the system.

Collisions between emergency vehicles and other vehicles are common events. Many of these collisions occur at inter-sections. Public vehicles approaching at 90 degrees to the direction of travel of emergency vehicles are very difficult to see. Sensors mounted on the vehicle could alert emergency vehicle drivers of approaching cross traffic. In such a scenario, sensors sends information to some sort of dispatching center which process incoming data and, in return, sends data to interested parties in form of positional information to traffic warning devices mounted in vehicles.

This design presents an early implementation of traffic warning device. Conventionally, it uses server software hosted on PC and pager which serves as client to display position of vehicles on city map. You can download project files here .

This project was developed by Flavio Ribeiro as at the University of São Paulo’s Polytechnic School of Engineering. It uses ARM9 (AT91RM9200) microcontroller running at 190MHz speed.

Board specifications are:

• 180 MHz ARM9 processor (Atmel AT91RM9200);

• 3 MPixel Micron MT9T001 CMOS sensor;

• Altera Cyclone FPGA with 6000 LEs;

• 2×32 MBytes of SDRAM (32MB for the ARM9 and 32MB for the FPGA)

• 16 Mbits of serial flash

• 1 10/100 Intel Ethernet interface

• 1 high speed USB 2.0 interface

• 1 SPI interface

• 1 serial (RS-232) interface

Board runs ARM Debian Linux from USB key-drive. CMOS sensor is accessed by FPGA. It reads image frames that can be processed further by FPGA or ARM9 microcontroller. It seems quite challenging project to play with.