Hello.

[Microzod]

Hello.

My name is David and I have an enthusiastic interest for electronics though couldn't call my self anything more than a hobbyist.

Somehow I have found myself buying a Arty A7-35 FPGA board and am now trying to learn how to use FPGA's in my projects.

Teaching my self(with a lot of help from the internet of course) to program microcontrollers was hard but teaching my self to program FPGA's feels even more overwhelming.

 

First I need to learn a lot of stuff but as far as projects goes my first goal is to utilize the FPGA in the design of a dual-phase lock-in amplifier, to be used to measure complex impedance.

Regards

[zygot]

On 6/4/2020 at 6:38 PM, Microzod said:

my first goal is to utilize the FPGA in the design of a dual-phase lock-in amplifier

Now that sounds like a nifty project. You probably don't need an FPGA for that project but it sure would make for an interesting FPGA project nonetheless. I suggest putting a few more less demanding project in front of your 1st project goal until you are comfortable with your skills. Think of designing with programmable logic as just that digital logic design, not as something similar to microprocessor software design.

Let me also suggest that you start off learning VHDL or Verilog as a design source flow. You may start off wondering why I insist on calling FPGA development logic design instead of software design but once you gt proficient with an HDL you will understand my point of view.

This is complex stuff and you can easily make the wrog assumptions from reading other peoples code, so start with the basics, don't rush, take your time, and enjoy the problems to be solved along the way.

 

 

[Microzod]

On 6/8/2020 at 10:13 PM, zygot said:

Now that sounds like a nifty project. You probably don't need an FPGA for that project but it sure would make for an interesting FPGA project nonetheless. I suggest putting a few more less demanding project in front of your 1st project goal until you are comfortable with your skills. Think of designing with programmable logic as just that digital logic design, not as something similar to microprocessor software design.

Let me also suggest that you start off learning VHDL or Verilog as a design source flow. You may start off wondering why I insist on calling FPGA development logic design instead of software design but once you gt proficient with an HDL you will understand my point of view.

This is complex stuff and you can easily make the wrog assumptions from reading other peoples code, so start with the basics, don't rush, take your time, and enjoy the problems to be solved along the way.

 

 

Thank you for your views.

When I got this FPGA board I was not even aware of the fact that through the Vivado software you can create things without writing any HDL at all, but yes my plan is to start by studying/learning VHDL or Verilog.

This is all mostly having fun with stuff but once I had gotten the FPGA I thought that perhaps it would be nicer to digitize the signals as soon as possible and do the multiplication in a processor or circuits in the FPGA since then I could multiply two sine-waves instead of 1 sine-wave and 1 square wave as would be the case if I did the multiplication with analog parts(I know that it is possible to make a analog multiplier for sine-waves but that is far beyond me).

[zygot]

1 hour ago, Microzod said:

This is all mostly having fun with stuff but once I had gotten the FPGA I thought that perhaps it would be nicer to digitize the signals as soon as possible and do the multiplication in a processor or circuits in the FPGA

I think that this is going to be a little more complicated than you are likely imagining it to be but I can assure you that your goal can be achieved using an FPGA board and the HDL approach. Since you are one of the curious types it should also provide hours of fun and interesting learning. Happy trails!