University student Naresh Singh Dobal created an FPGA-based, RF-controllable rover vehicle for his Digital Systems Design class, as his final project last year. Naresh is using a Xilinx Spartan 3AN FPGA dev board for the brains of the system, and has done all the coding in VHDL. The whole project was made and programmed pretty much from scratch, all the way down to the custom RF joystick module.
The commands from the RF controller module show up on the LCD screen on the Spartan 3AN dev board, as can be seen in the video. The project designer says this was important because he needed to verify that the rover was getting the commands correctly: forward, left, right, stop, and reverse. The rover is also outfitted with a webcam, so you can see where it is going when it’s out of your sight, and use it to spy on your cat, or your kids, or whatever.
Naresh sheds a bit more light on his project:
In this project we use a land rover with a FPGA board and a peripheral or supporting board to receive RF signal, detect pressed key and motor driving, In this project we use a wireless RF transmitter which gives this rover flexibility to work from a distance of 50mt. to 100 mt. range without line of sight condition, that means you can transmit your signal through walls and you can operate rover from a room to any other area. In this project we have done some improvements that is we use a LCD display to display the commands which our land rover received from transmitter module, This will helpful to know that whether the rover receiving the proper signal or not, as shown in video. If rover not receive proper signal than in that case rover will automatically stops and stop command shows on lcd display. In the advancement of this project you can also use a wireless camera to transmit real time video to the display unit and for recording purpose as well, so that this project can be use for surveillance and security purposes as well.
Great video, Naresh. I hope you got an “A” in that class!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.