RAT CPU

Our project repository contains all the parts that make up the RAT CPU, software programs written in Assembly, hardware assignments written for the CPU, and our final project where we built a basketball shot detector that runs on the computer. This project site aims to better explain and showcase each part of what we did.

Overview

Over the course of 10 weeks, our group learned about the different parts of a typical computer system and began implementing each of those parts. The RAT Microcontroller(MCU) is a basic computer that runs in VHDL on a Basys 3 FPGA development board. This computer runs a basic set of commands in RAT Assembly, as indicated in the RAT Assembler Manual. In addition to creating components for our computer, we spent time learning how to write programs in Assembly that could run on the computer we were building. These were tested in RAT Sim, simulation software that could run our code while the full computer was still being developed.

Everything culminated in our final project, where we decided to take an existing basketball hoop and use a sensor with our RAT CPU in order to detect shots. Through this project, we were able to learn how to interface with our computer in a more concrete sense and how to write programs for it.

RAT CPU Architecture

This is the RAT architecture diagram that shows all the components of the RAT CPU and how they are connected.

Components

Below is an outline of each part of this project. Click on each component to see what we did! Click here for each component’s specifications

RAT Microcontroller

• rat1 - Intro to Architecture & Assembly Language Programming (+ Reverse Engineering)
• rat2 - Program Counter (Source)
• rat3 - Memory Fundamentals (Register File & Scratch RAM) (Source)
• rat4 - Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) (Source)
• rat5 - Control Unit & RAT MCU (Source)
• rat6 - RAT Wrapper (Source)
• rat7 - Stack Pointer (Source)
• rat8 - Interrupts (Source)

Software

• sw1 - Intro (Source)
• sw2 - Conditional Statements (Source)
• sw3 - Loops (Source)
• sw4 - Division (Source)
• sw5 - Arrays (Source)
• sw6 - Stack (Source)
• sw7 - Subroutines (Source)
• sw8 - Interrupts (Source)

Hardware

• hw1 - PWM RC DAC (Source)
• hw2 - Speaker Driver (Source)
• hw3 - Keypad Driver (Source)
• hw4 - Interrupt Controller (Source)

Final Project

• final_project - Basketball Shot Detector (Source)

Demos

We created video demos for some of our project’s components, which can be found here.

Text taken in part from PolyLearn (C)2017 Jeff Gerfen, Paul Hummel