FPGA Audio Visualizer Project

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Embedded Systems Design student Zhemao and his class group have been working on an FPGA FFT audio visualizer for their final project. Their design was implemented entirely in VHDL on an Altera DE2 board, the results of which are all bouncy and blue in the above vid. Basically, it’s a hardware audio player that reads audio from an SD card and plays it on the DE2 board’s audio codec while simultaneously displaying an FFT visualization of the audio samples.

Here’s what Zhemao has to say about his group’s project:

We have 256 frequency bins and sum groups of 16 to display on the monitor. We use a 256-point radix-16 Cooley-Tukey algorithm (with fixed point coefficients in a lookup table) to compute the frequency components. (Link: Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm)

It turns out we really don’t need all those frequencies. Most of the audio range is contained in the first two bins you see on the monitor currently. We will change the visualization to only display those frequencies in a later iteration of the design.


If you’re interested in seeing more on the implementation for this project, you can check out Zhemao’s VHDL at his GitHub here.

(via YouTube)

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