Back in September 1997, we (Adrian and Dan), were given the opportunity to choose a project in ee552, and construct it. The design we chose would be based around an ACT1 fgpa from Actel. After much thought and consideration, we decided to design and build a digital hygometer and humidifier controller. Since humidity is an environmental variable which affects us all in terms of meteorological phenomena and health, we knew that this project would be interesing and useful. The design would be taylored for use of the PHILIPS capacitive sensor (part no 2322 691 90001). To make the project more interesting, we decided to have a visual interface of 7 segment LED displays, and a keypad input. The purpose of the visual output would be to show the current humidity, as well as the desired humidity level. The desired humidity level would be entered by typing in two numbers (the desired relative humidity). If the relative humidity detected was below the desired humidity, a signal would be sent to turn a humidifier on.
This report includes a review of the results of our design, and a load of information documenting our design. All of the fpga design was implemented in VHDL, so we also included the VHDL code in this report. Since we used VHDL, we were able to break up our design into 5 main modules. This design portion of this report describes each of these modules in detail.
Of course we had originally wanted to design many more features, but due to time and space constraints, we could not implement these. However, we feel confident in the functionality, and proud of the design we did accomplish.