This FPGA soft design is an AVI Player that runs on an Altium NB3000 NanoBoard. It showcases data storage, video display, audio, graphical user interface on an LCD touch screen and serial communications. Source AVI data is stored on an SD card, plugged into the NB3000 SD card slot at the right-hand front side of the NB3000. A sample AVI is included in the download, unzip it and copy it to the SD card.
When the project is downloaded and run on the NB3000 a simple file browser appears on the LCD touch screen. Use the touch screen to browse to the AVI file, select it, then touch the Play button. The AVI file will be played back with video on the LCD and audio out of the NB3000 speakers.
The FPGA project demonstrates the simplicity and elegance of the OpenBus approach to design, where each major FPGA design element is placed as an OpenBus component, with just one or two lines to connect it to the other OpenBus components. This allows for rapid system building and an easily interpreted OpenBus diagram.
The OpenBus document in the FPGA project includes:
- TSK3000 32-bit embedded processor
- Terminal Instrument
- I2S Audio Streaming Controller
- SPI Master Controller
- Touchscreen Pen Control
- 32 bit TFT controller
- SDHC Controller
- ASP
- OpenBus Arbiter
- SRAM controller
The FPGA project also demonstrates Altium Designer’s C-to-Hardware capabilities, implementing the VideoCopy function in FPGA hardware. C-to-Hardware capabilities are accessed through the ASP (Application Specific Processor) OpenBus component.
The embedded software showcases Altium Designer’s Software Platform builder, a visual, structured approach to including low-level driver and context code for peripherals, into the code. When the project is running, status information is printed to the terminal instrument, displayed within Altium Designer.
Note: The example AVI player requires the AVI video format to be: 16-bit RGB (5:6:5) uncompressed , bottom up, little endian (sometimes called 'uncompressed 64K color' on Microsoft platforms). RGB 555 is supported as well ('uncompressed 32K color'). Maximum filesize is 1Gb. For more information refer to the readme.txt included with the example.
Altium Designer Projects included in this download:
- NB3000_AVI_Player.PrjFpg
- NB3000_AVI_Player.PrjEmb