Black Magic and FPGAs

As the title implies, this post is about black magic and FPGAs – really one and the same from my perspective at the moment. After talking to someone who knows a few things about engine controls (as well as considering some of the analysis I did before my recent ThumperFI hiatus), I established that interrupt-based timing is not the best approach. Currently I have the 16-bit timer on the ATmega644 connected to the ICP pin, which fires an interrupt at a rising edge of the trigger wheel signal. This seems like a great idea until you consider the fact that there’s a separate 8-bit timer firing at a fixed rate and that there are a number of complex calculations that need to happen during that interrupt (including a few 32-bit ones). I monitored some outputs on my logic analyzer to check timing of this interrupt, as well as the auxiliary 8-bit timer and found that the 16-bit timer was frequently pushing back the 8-bit timer interrupt which lead to incorrect timing.

What’s the solution to this? In industry, this is where the co-processor comes in. Where do FPGAs fit in to this? Well, FPGAs are at the forefront of engine control technology (there’s a great SAE paper about the application of some Drivven technology on an YZF-R6 about this very topic). FPGAs offer flexibility, high-speed, parallel processing and portability. You write your IP cores in a HDL and with little to no tweaking you can run your synthesized design on a vast array of different FPGAs. I recently procured a Mojo FPGA development board based on the Xilinix Spartan-6 family. I also have another board based on the Xilinix Spartan-3 family that has a few more useful learning features – like more buttons and LEDs. At the moment I’m just learning the basics of Verilog and how to think in parallel rather than sequential operations.

More to come on Verilog and FPGAs soon.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *