Colon on Basys2 board

[jer333]

I am doing a timer project in my project lab 1 and need to turn on the colon on the 4 digit 7 seg diplay. I cannot find anything that it is connected to and tried to declare it as an output and assigned it both 0 and 1, but it still does not turn on. I have seen other forums that say that they don't believe it can be turned on. Can you please help me turn the colon on?

Michael Bates

[jpeyron]

Hi Michael,

Unfortunately, the colon does not turn on. There are the 7 segments and the decimal place or dp.

thank you,

Jon

[D@n]

@jer333,

Have you seen the Real Time Clock core on OpenCores?  It features a timer, and fills out the bit values for a 7-segment display.  No, it doesn't create electrical attachments to a hardware device that doesn't have them (such as for the colon), but I have stolen the decimal point bits for other purposes.  The timer also runs in units of seconds and fractions of a second, rather than in clock tick units.  (The core also features a clock, a stop watch, and an alarm.  A companion core, also in the same repository, handles calendar dates)

There's also a very generic timer as part of the ZipCPU project, here, on open cores as well.  (It's in the trunk/rtl/peripherals directory, and called ziptimer.v)  This one works on clock ticks.  It's a wonderful example of a very simple timer peripheral--if you are looking for simplicity, you might find it here.

Both clock and timer are controlled via a wishbone bus.

Just thought I'd point it out,

Dan