PROJECT DETAILS: SOURI GUHA (Email: souri.guha@ieee.org Blog: souriguha.wordpress.

com)

PROJECT: To develop a programmable thermostat controller using the UCOS-II RTOS on a

Spartan-3 FPGA (July 2009)
Details: The project aimed at demonstrating the abilities of the UCOS-II RTOS, so that we can perform multiple tasks on a
single processor. It was not that the task could not be performed with regular C-Programming, but we intended to try out a
different way to execute the same task and in the process get familiar with the UCOS-II RTOS

Hardware Details: The hardware consisted of the following devices:

The Spartan 3 starter kit from Xilinx
Dipswitches used to similate an 8bit ADC that would convert ananog temperature data from a thermometer
and provide data to the CPU
Two LED’s used to simulate the Heater and Cooler on/off process

Software Details: The tasks involving software were done as follows:

The hardware of the FPGA was built using the Xilinx Platform Studio 11, and involved the IP cores that came
with the software itself
Code burnt to the FPGA device using Xilinx iMPACT
The UCOS –II Kernel was downloaded from the authors website
The tasks were written in Xilinx XPS itself after consulting the proper API’s of the UCOS-II Kernel

The User Interface: The UI was developed to control the operation of the thermostat as well as monitor its
real time status. The UI was based entirely on the UART, so we could see the interface on the Hyperterminal of
a PC and interact with it when required or just sit back and observe the status of the device.

The software was written to execute 3 different tasks that communicated to each others by using semaphores. The
details of the tasks are as follows:

Task 1: The task with higest priority. Used to Monitor user actions
Task 2: Task with second highest priority. Used to monitor the current temperature.
Task 3: Task with lowest priority. Used to control the AC/Heater

I have attached a presentation that I had prepared after the project got over that includes all details of the project and the
optimization sessions as well.