skirtsandspanners

Electronics is all about the acronyms, there’s no stopping the shortening of ridiculously long names, it kind of runs tangential to our documentation. Sometimes if you don’t know your acronyms it can be like reading a foreign language made up of 3 letter words with minimal vowels. Even after you’ve deciphered what everything is, you’ve then got to work out exactly what the sentence is telling you. We like to be direct and concise us engineers and this often leads to a headache inducing sentence that takes a diagram to understand fully! VHDL is no exception!

Acronym madness...

VHDL or Very high speed Hardware Description Language, to put it in “layman’s” terms ha, is the programming language predominantly used to program FPGAs (another acronym). It is ultimately one of the most powerful languages of the electronics era, massively useful stuff, it’s right up there in the electronic engineers handbook of languages that the rest of the world doesn’t know exist. My mum still thinks that c programming language is made up of variations between the lower case ‘c’ and upper case ‘c’. She just can’t get why I find it difficult!

VHDL is a language that doesn’t run sequentially, it’s sort of a what ever is occurring at that second kind of language. Imagine you’ve got to go to the shops, if you were sequentially programmed you would go to the shop, select what you needed one after the other, and go pay. When you aren’t sequentially programmed you do many things at once. You would go to the shops and grab everything at once and pay once you had everything. This is because VHDL is programming a logic device in this case a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), it’s not waiting on decisions it’s simply taking the decisions as they arrive and routing them through logic gates to get the desired output. Now for me, this is THE perfect language!

FPGA programming is kinda like drawing out the circuit you want and placing it on a chip in miniature, using VHDL coding. I’m currently using a tool which takes the schematic you draw and converts it into coding. Initially I started learning VHDL coding, but I am working on modifying a previous design which had been written using the schematic tool. I’m hoping I’ll learn lots about logic gates and registers, and get a better grasp of how the language and FPGAs work. After all that’s the hard bit, the syntax will hopefully come naturally after that!

Time to fill my boots with truth tables!

Hello Bloggy Readers! I hope you’re all having a lovely Sunday evening! Yet again the weekend has ended too quickly and I’m suddenly back at work. This week is going be quite a good un’ though. I think the past 6 months of doing little odd jobs and minor projects have defiantly been worth it! I have quite suddenly been thrust into two new projects; one very major, and one collaborating with a team in China.

I’ll start with the Chinese project, all my projects since starting my placement have been interesting in some aspects but have been of a lowish skill level. I’m not expected to spend weeks learning something, we’re talking simple test equipment, LED’s lighting up when certain signals are present, that kind of thing. But I’ve moved up a level with my next project. I’m working with a team in China to devise a life test for some equipment. This project involves me doing a fair bit of FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) design. Now any Electronic Engineers out there will tell you that most jobs look for a candidate with experience in FPGA design. Sadly I wont learn it at uni as it’s no longer covered by my course (massive bummer). Either way to be getting ahead of the game and doing some work alongside a senior hardware engineer, is a massive boost to my CV. So over the last couple of weeks I’ve been refreshing my memory on logic gates, and learning as much VHDL coding language! Project starts tomorrow! Very excited!

On top of my new Chinese project, I’ve been assigned a very important project. My company is on the verge of having a full prototype of their next generation of machine built, it’ll be my job to design and build a hardware only version of the next generation of machine. It’ll be used by the software team to prototype new software. As software won’t need to do any mechanical or thermal testing it’s not essential for a full prototype to be made. There are hardware only prototypes of all the most recent machines, they are constructed out of network 19inch shelving framework, and placed on wheels.The whole machine must fit in/on the framework, alongside all the lighting and a HMI (human machine interface) with test functions. As there is so much lighting required, it has to be fitted on the outside and shielded so it doesn’t blind everyone in the lab; this has led for them to become known as the Dalek’s, hence the exterminate, exterminate! Although I’m not aiming for a full on alien controlled optical sorting machine, I should consider it for an extra, or so the ever so slightly geeky systems engineer suggested! Translation of every so geeky being that he used the word “kaled” to describe previous versions of the Hardware Daleks. Google it, I had to! A really exciting, diverse project to be getting on with!

I hope your Monday’s are as good as I anticipate mine to be! A good 4 days till I have to present my specification to the R&D managers eek!