So, a few more days down the line. I've found that the easy way out - Altera's SOPC Builder - is a complete waste of energy. While it simplifies a lot of the PCI goo between the target controller and the logic, it actually looks like it will make everything far more difficult in terms of bringing up any VHDL that connects to it all. The most basic example generated a massive, sprawling, unmaintainable top level. The quickest test of a working "system" would have been the MAXII PCI card devices (LEDs, temperature sensor, LCD controller, switches) however the temperature sensor (which is on i2c) is not in the IP core library, and bringing in too much external technology while simplifying what I have to write, just seems like it would get in the way of teaching students what it does. There has to be just the right amount of black box magic.

Therefore the definite direction is to build on top of the PCI Compiler MegaWizard flow, generate a target core, and interface it manually. As a "quick" test I'm working on a very simple PCI target which contains a few simple, hardcoded registers (perhaps with some clever hexadecimal words in it) - read only and writable to make sure I have the logic down. It took a long while to scour through the Altera documentation and my trusty PCI book (PCI System Architecture 4th Edition) to match up any concepts and work out what the PCI core does in addition.

I think I have that down now.

Further projects are getting line sensors on the arm so we can turn it into a closed loop design, making a set of labels for the arm joints to let the line sensors count and measure movement. This is more difficult than it looked, at least with the yellow arm (see previous posts and pictures), as there are very few places to put them.

In other news we noticed this today - a robot arm controller powered by an MPC5200B.



It can't be said that the MPC5200B isn't a great little chip for robotics applications. I am curious as to why it costs $24,000 USD though. That's certainly not for the MPC5200B board, but perhaps it's a really really good robot arm (picking up a Tux plushie seems, then, to be understating it's usefulness, but it would make for a great first test here :)