Summary

In this chapter, we’ve explored how to do some simple communication with the outside world. We’ve gathered microphone data, stored it, and played it back. With our interface to the ADT7420, we’ve also explored the I2C bus, a common way of communicating with slower devices. We captured temperature data and showed how we could display a fixed-point number on the seven-segment display. We introduced FIFOs and discussed how we can filter the data to remove the noisiness of the temperature data varying.

I2C interfaces are used to communicate with many low-speed devices such as A/Ds and D/As and are very important for a lot of FPGA designs. You should feel comfortable that you can do it at this point, and we will explore how to make a more generic version of the interface in a later chapter. If you are interested in audio data, you should have some confidence in capturing, manipulating, and generating audio.

In the next chapter, we are going to look...