# Wooden Bits Binary Clock FPGA Port

December 23, 2018

In attempt to get started with FPGAs and Verilog, I decided to port Wooden Bits to a Lattice IceStick – selected because of the Open-Source IceStorm toolchain. Counters and flip-flops are the first thing one learns when starting with FPGA design, so the project lends itself naturally. I learnt things FPGAs are good at and things they are not so good at – best done on a microcontroller. As the project was educational, there were many learnings along the way and invariably still to be learnt; it is not intended as a best use of FPGAs or implementation.

The most enlightening part of the learning and what finally kicked me to do the project, was the PicoSOC project and in particular, Matt Venn’s addition of a WS2812 peripheral to the PicoSOC. The idea of rolling one’s own peripheral for driving external hardware into a SoC or only adding the required ones is new ground for me. The concept also really helps to cement what is actually going on when accessing registers during development of embedded software.

## Binary Clock Counter Design

A binary clock is essentially a frequency divider, which can be formed using D-Type Flip-Flops, each data line clocking the next. In order to reset the 4 bit counter at 9 (or the other digits for time), a modulo 9 counter is created by using an AND gate driving reset with bits 1 & 3 (as it clocks 10). This is assuming the D-Type is asynchronous (will reset on reset edge). If it were synchronous, the AND gate must be connected to bits 0 & 3 (9), such that the reset will be clocked as it would be counting 10. The difference becomes quite important in Verilog, particularly when driving the next digit modules with the reset signal.

It’s good to start with a logic diagram of what one is trying to achieve so I drew one up in Falstad (import this file). To implement this, I designed a counter module for each digit that is asynchronous (reset on reset edge), so that the reset line can directly feed the next digit module. Initially, my approach was synchronous (read reset on clk edge) but this meant having to have a ‘carry’ output on reset to clock the other digits at the correct time (otherwise they would clock one digit a head of the desired value).

Interestingly, one could use a single counter register rather than individual modules. I developed an alternative based on this idea, using bit logic to clear/increment bit addresses. The advantage is that it only uses 13 bits rather than 16 bits. Other than this, the modular system synthesis should resolve down to the same thing (something that looks like the Falstad simulation), since the reset inputs driving each module are just wire bit logic as in the massive if, else. I think having modules for each digit helps with readability and helped with learning the module aspect of Verilog.

module counter(
input clk,
input rst,
output [BITS-1:0] digit);

parameter BITS = 4;

reg [BITS-1:0] digit = 0;

always @ (posedge clk or posedge rst) begin
if (rst)
digit &lt;= 0;
else
digit &lt;= digit + 1;
end

endmodule

/* seconds (4 and 3 bits but leave all) */
wire [3:0] ds0;
wire rst_ds0 = ((ds0[1] & ds0[3]) || reset); // 10
counter s0(clock_clk, rst_ds0, ds0);
wire [3:0] ds1;
wire rst_ds1 = ((ds1[1] & ds1[2]) || reset); // 6(0) minutes
counter s1(rst_ds0, rst_ds1, ds1);

/* minutes (4 and 3 bits but leave all) */
wire [3:0] dm0;
wire rst_dm0 = ((dm0[1] & dm0[3]) || reset); // 10
counter m0(rst_ds1, rst_dm0, dm0);
wire [3:0] dm1;
wire rst_dm1 = ((dm1[1] & dm1[2]) || reset); // 6(0) minutes
counter m1(rst_dm0, rst_dm1,  dm1);

/* hours (4 and 2 bits but leave all) */
wire [3:0] dh0;
wire rst_dh0 = ((dh0[1] & dh0[3]) || rst_dh1 || reset); // 10 or tens of hour reset
counter h0(rst_dm1, rst_dh0, dh0);
wire [3:0] dh1;
wire rst_dh1 = ((dh1[1] & dh0[2]) || reset); // 2(0) & 4 hours
counter h1(rst_dh0, rst_dh1, dh1);


The Falstad simulation realised in Verilog as a per digit synchronous reset module.

module binary_clock(clk, reset, ce, count);
input clk, reset;
input ce;  // count enable
output [13:0] count; // two digit bcd counter

reg [13:0] count;
wire [3:0] d0 = count[3:0];
wire [2:0] d1 = count[6:4];
wire [3:0] d2 = count[10:7];
wire [1:0] d3 = count[12:11];

always @(posedge clk or posedge reset) begin
if (reset) begin
count &lt;= 0;
end else begin
if (ce) begin
if (count[3] & count[0]) begin // 9
count[3:0] &lt;= 0;
if (count[6] & count[4]) begin // 5
count[6:4] &lt;= 0;
if (count[10] & count[7]) begin // 9
count[10:7] &lt;= 0;
if (count[12] & count[8] * count[7]) begin // 2 & last 3
count[12:11] = 0;
end else begin
count[12:11] &lt;= count[12:11] + 1;
end
end else begin
count[10:7] &lt;= count[10:7] + 1;
end
end else begin
count[6:4] &lt;= count[6:4] + 1;
end
end else begin
count[3:0] &lt;= count[3:0] + 1;
end
end
end
end
endmodule


Alternatively, one module to do all digits but with 13 bits rather than 16 bits.

For development, the clock input to the first Flip-Flop is taken from a divided down master clock (12 MHz) to form a 1 Hz clock. For actual deployment on the bench, I added an additional clock input pin for driving from an external 1 Hz clock generator such as can be found on RTCs.

## WS2812 LED Matrix

My original design uses sixteen one-wire WS2812 LEDs chained through the laser-cut wood to form an addressable LED matrix. WS2812 LEDs simplify wiring and hardware complexity over standard LEDs, at the cost of CPU cycles: The one-wire interface sends 24 bit colour data for each LED by modulating the period of high/low in a serial data stream. Each LED takes the first 24 bits,then sends forwards the rest of the data to the next in line. Since microcontrollers don’t have a peripheral specifically designed to do this, it is normally done using Timers and match/overflow interrupt routines.

An FPGA can make light work of this however and my real interest peaked with the idea that one can make a WS2812 peripheral with no processor overhead.

// map bits to matrix in snakes and ladder formation...
assign led_matrix = {
dh1[3], dh0[3], dm1[3], dm0[3],
dm0[2], dm1[2], dh0[2], dh1[2],
dh1[1], dh0[1], dm1[1], dm0[1],
dm0[0], dm1[0], dh0[0], dh1[0]};

for (i=0; i&lt;NUM_LEDS; i=i+1) begin
led_rgb_data[24 * i +: 24] &lt;= (led_matrix[i] | rainbow) ? display_rgb : 24'h00_00_00;
end


The binary clock face only needs to set LEDs on or off. I created a fork of Matt Venn’s WS2812 module that can access the LED colour register directly so that the code then does a mask operation using the digit registers on each update of the digits (1 Hz in standard operation). The main real overhead driving the LEDs is the size of the colour register that is 24 * N bits, where N is the number of LEDs. The FPGA must latch this data, as it can change at different clock edges. I experimented with various different modifications to the code, each with it’s merits but settled on the direct setting of the RGB register for this project.

## Clock Features

### Set Button

The set button was easy to port: I added an input to the top module connected to an IO pin and a button with hardware pull-up and debounce – hardware is a key point here, I did both on the uC previously. If the button is pressed, the clock source to the first counter flip-flop changes to one that is running at 1000 Hz (using a counter based divider) and the display colour changes red. Releasing the button returns the clock to the normal state. This allows a user to quickly advance the clock to the correct time.

/* binary clock source is either clk_1 (external 1 Hz) or clk_2 (1 kHz) if button is pressed */
wire clock_clk = CLK_1HZ ^ (clk_2 && ~BTN);


Whilst it was an easy port, the user interaction is much less refined compared to the software version. My software design features a delay before advancing at accelerated time so one can button press through minutes when near the correct time, or hold the button to advance quickly. It will also wait in set mode for a few seconds on release before setting the new time. Additionally, the set button can be used to set the main display colour.

These advanced interaction would all be possible on the FPGA but the design would become somewhat messy and it would need to be carefully implemented as to avoid FPGA bad practices (there are some big pitfalls I have found!). My take away was that these kind of user interaction features are better done in software – there is minimal overhead compared to driving the LEDs and it is very quick to implement.

### Rainbow Colour Cycle

My original clock also fills the display with a rainbow colour routine at midday and midnight. Implementing this on the IceStick became quite challenging as I quickly overran the 1280 LUTs (basically combinational logic). I think this was due to setting a RGB colour for each LED in the colour register, where as before it was just an option between two colours based on whether a bit was high or low. Without the rainbow effect, the sythesis was a simple logic mask but with the addition of full 24 bit colour at run time, it would require much more complicated logic. In addition, the routine works using a pseudo colour wheel that also adds complexity to the logic synthesis, due to three < switches.

task colour_wheel; begin
if (wheel &lt; 85) begin
red &lt;= (255 - wheel * 3);
green &lt;= 0;
blue &lt;= wheel * 3;
end else if (wheel &lt; 170)  begin
red &lt;= 0;
green &lt;= (wheel - 85) * 3;
blue &lt;= (255 - (wheel - 85) * 3);
end else begin
red &lt;= (wheel - 170) * 3;
green &lt;= (255 - (wheel - 170)* 3);
blue &lt;= 0;
end