1. Team 3
Power Meter
James Aitkenhead, Nicole Ogden, Matt Quantz

2. The Product
 Targets customers who want to monitor energy
statistics with an easy-to-use graphical interface
 Our widget will help you to be more aware of your
energy usage, saving you time and money

3. Mechanical Design

4. Mechanical Design

5. Project Management
 We used a combination of traditional and agile
project management.
 It would be very hard to manage a project that
has never been done before using a strictly
traditional approach (hard to estimate task
durations)

6. Resource Scoping
 FPGA
 Different versions of Nios II
 Software
 IP Blocks
 Internal Power Supply
 Outsourcing Consultants
 Other items considered for design

7. Code Repository
 Used TortoiseSVN for Project Version Control
 Directory Structure:
 C Code
 C Scripts
 C Test
 RTL Code
 RTL Scripts
 RTL Test
 Documentation
 This Directory Structure Supports Reusability

8. Code Reviews
 We did not implement formal code reviews
 We collaborated between team members for
writing and testing code

9. Benefits of RTL and C Coding Guidelines
 Makes Code More Readable
 Makes Code More Reusable
 Makes Code More Portable
 Increases Productivity of Code Reviews
 Allows Auto-Documentation (Doxygen)

10. IP Design and Reuse
 IP Component Reuse saves time in a project
 Component Reusability should be paramount in a
design
 Reusability brings the product to market faster

11. Hardware to Software Interface
 A register map is a listing of all the memory
registers used in the project, and their address
 The register map is used by everyone from
design to layout to verification engineers
 This makes it important to create the map early in
the project
 The register map can be created manually, or
there is software available to automate the
process

12. Functional Verification
 Direct testing was used
 Code Coverage was 100%

13. Cost Estimate (Break-Even Cost)
Part Price
Fpga 30
Lcd + touch 100
Pcb 30
Case 25
MCP3909 7.50
Power supply 10
Software 1,000,000
Outsourcing consultants Free
Engineering time spent Priceless
IP blocks used 100
Misc. components 200
Total ~ $500

14. Lessons Learned
 Don’t wait until the last minute to add
documentation
 Read the datasheets for little “Easter eggs” which
could delay
progress
 Divide tasks more evenly between team members

15. Roadblocks
 We struggled to re-create last quarter’s touch
screen interface
 We struggled to learn how to use all the project
tracking tools effectively
 We struggled with the opto-isolator interface
between the MCP3909 and the FPGA
 The SPI interface was odd to work with

16. Conclusions
 We successfully interfaced with the MCP3909
Evaluation Board
 We successfully displayed the measured data on the
16x2 character LCD
 This was a fun project with numerous practical
applications
 With more time, we would implement a wireless data
transfer, uploading the data to the Internet, or both
 Also with more time we were going to try to
implement Ethernet to connect the device to the
internet and communicate to websites like: “Google
Powermeter,” and “Microsoft hohm;” to relay instant