Junior Design Competition Fall 2016

For my CpE 200 (Digital Logic Design II) Lab, we were asked to create a project using the DE2 FPGA board as the controller for the project. My partner (Alex Cater), and I decided to create a 4-DoF Robotic Arm, with Joystick Control for our project. This project utilized an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) for the Joystick input, utilizing SPI serial protocol. The robotic arm was composed of 5 Dynamixel RX-28s, which utilize the RS-485 serial protocol. This project involved creating a UART Controller in order to send the proper commands to the arm, and an SPI Controller to control the joystick input. Finally, we created a main controller that would translate the joystick input into commands that could be sent to the arm. All of this was done on an FPGA board, making the timing and logic more flexible, but also more design intensive. For our work with this project, we were awarded First Place in the Fall 2016 Junior Design Competition at UNLV, which prepares students for the Senior Design Competition held during their final year at UNLV. Alex and I will be creating a tutorial based on our work, so that one can replicate this project themselves.