We are launching laboratory work of the “School of Digital Circuit Synthesis” on the FPGA board Mars Rover 3GW2

You've probably heard about the “School of Digital Circuit Synthesis”. Here they teach digital logic and FPGA programming. Anyone can enroll in school courses and undergo training. There are branches of the school in many cities.

The school is preparing a laboratory program for studying FPGAs. They are published on Github: https://github.com/yuri-panchul/basics-graphics-music

The peculiarity of these laboratory works is that they are adapted for completely different FPGA boards, boards from different manufacturers, different capacities of FPGA chips, different FPGA vendors.

We forked these labs https://github.com/marsohod4you/basics-graphics-music and adapted laboratory work to our Mars Rover 3GW2 board.

Here I will talk a little about some of the educational work that runs on the FPGA board. I already talked about the Mars Rover2GW2 board itself in an article on Habré.

And here, this video shows the launch of some laboratory work:

By time:

3:30 Laboratory 1_06_binary_counter. Here is a simple binary counter, its bits are displayed on the board's 8 LEDs. The reset button stops the counting.

5:25 Laboratory 1_09_hex_counter. The project is a little more complicated. In addition to the LEDs, the counter value is also displayed on a seven-segment indicator.

6:27 Laboratory 1_05_7seven_segment_letter. Here, on the seven-segment indicator, only one letter P or F is displayed. By pressing the key0 button, the letter changes. By pressing the key1 button, the position of the letter on the indicator changes.

8:25 Laboratory work 1_08_7segment_word. The letters F, P, G, A run on the seven-segment display. You can make them run quickly and then they merge to the eye into a single word FPGA. Like this:

10:52 Laboratory work 2_1_rectangle_ellipse_parabola. You can connect an HDMI monitor to the board and then the board will be able to display colored shapes, rectangles, ellipses on it:

In general, there are several labs that display graphics. I tried each of them, but not all are shown in the video demonstration above. For example, in the laboratory kit there are also “color stripes”:

There are even simple “video games” in the labs.

I prepared another demonstration of our Mars Rover3GW2 board as part of the laboratory work of the School of Digital Circuit Synthesis. These are laboratory works related to the recognition of sound, notes and melodies:

This video shows laboratory work 3_1_note_recognizer

A smartphone with Android OS is used as a sound signal generator. We install piano programs and/or a sound signal generator on the smartphone. The smartphone is connected with a special simple audio cable to the input of the ADC board. You just need to feed the signal through a coupling capacitor and use a voltage divider across resistors to set the midpoint.

The video shows me pressing the keys on a digital piano on a smartphone, while the seven-segment display shows the note letter recognized in the FPGA: C, D, E F.

The second option for conducting the lab, shown in this video: we launch the signal generator on the smartphone and by changing the frequency of the sine wave from 440Hz to 880Hz (A notes in different octaves), we see that the board recognizes the notes and displays them with a letter on the indicator.

Therefore, we believe that Mars rover 3GW2 board suitable for experiments in the School of Digital Circuit Synthesis.