LED Matrix Controller

LED matrix controller implementation for the Digilent Basys 3 FPGA board. This project uses the Adafruit LED Matrix Bonnet for Raspberry Pi. Using this controller, an arbitrary image may be displayed on an LED matrix.

For more information on how the LED matrix controller works, please refer to HOWITWORKS.md.

Project Structure

• ip/: Contains Xilinx IP configuration files
• rtl/: Design implementation
• tb/: Testbench implementation
• inc/: Additional files needed to synthesize the design
• tools/: Useful tools for working with the project

Setting up the project

To try this project on a Basys 3 board, you will need Vivado 2021.1 or greater and Python 3. The following instructions have been tested on Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS.

Create the Vivado Project

Execute the following script to set up a Vivado project for this repository:

mkdir led-matrix-vivado
./project_setup.sh led-matrix-vivado

This script will create a Vivado project in the led-matrix-demo directory and then open it in Vivado.

You may include the --nogui option to prevent the script from starting Vivado.

Hardware Set Up

To try this project, you will need the Digilent Basys 3 board, Adafruit LED Matrix Bonnet and an Adafruit LED matrix.

Connect jumper wires between the GPIO header on the LED Matrix Bonnet and the Basys 3 Pmod headers as follows.

Pmod Header JB

• JB1 -> GPIO 16
• JB2 -> GPIO 6
• JB3 -> GPIO 5
• JB4 -> GPIO 21
• JB7 -> GPIO 23
• JB8 -> GPIO 12
• JB9 -> GPIO 21
• JB10 -> GPIO 13

Pmod Header JC

• JC1 -> GPIO 4
• JC3 -> GPIO 27
• JC4 -> GPIO 22
• JC9 -> GPIO 20
• JC10 -> GPIO 26

Display your Own Image

Follow these steps if you would like to display an image on your LED matrix other than the provided example image. The script image2mem.py has been provided for this purpose. It converts an image to a memory file for the FPGA.

If not already installed, install imageio:

pip3 install imageio

If pip is not installed, follow the official installation instructions here.

The top Verilog file is configured to initialize block RAM with the file inc/matrix_data.mem. Execute the following command to replace this file with a memory file corresponding to your image:

./tools/image2mem.py /path/to/your/image inc/matrix_data.mem

image2mem.py works with any image format supported by imageio.

Feature roadmap

• Double-buffering
• Microblaze support
  • Example program

Contact

• Daniel Taillard <[email protected]>