Latency Reduction and Modularity Improvement of a Raspberry Pi-FPGA Control System

The current setup used for the courses “Embedded System Laboratories” and “Real-time Software Development” and for rapid prototyping in the lab is a Raspberry PI in combination with an FPGA. The FPGA comes with a purchased board called the Ico-board, which is a HAT(hardware on top) for the Raspberry Pi. It communicates to the Raspberry Pi with the use of an SPI bus. This current setup was made to modernize the previous setup, but it falls short of the desired standards for flexibility and performance.

The goal for this project can be split into two parts. The first goal is to make the setup more modular to get an easy way to change the FPGA configuration when adding, removing or changing sensors or actuators. The second goal is to
reduce the latency between the communication of the Raspberry Pi and FPGA. Within this assignment, trade-offs have to be made between modularity, accuracy and latency.