Exploiting LabVIEW FPGA in implementation of real-time sensor data acquisition for rowing monitoring system

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) platform has been increasingly used in sensor-based applications because of reconfigurable and parallelisms features offered in the FPGA. However, most of the application designers are unfamiliar with hardware programming and design concepts of the FPGA. This paper presents an implementation of real-time sensor data acquisition (ReSDAq) for rowing monitoring system using LabVIEW FPGA which utilising the high-level synthesis (HLS) technique. The HLS allows application designers to use high-level language for configuring the FPGA. The ReSDAq application comprises of a tri-axis accelerometer sensor, an LCD monitor, and a National Instrument (NI) sbRIO-9632 board. The sbRIO-9632 board was targeted programmed on the Xilinx FPGA core to acquire sensor data and compute acceleration of the arm movement of the rower. From this study, it was found that the compilation time to convert G-code into hardware description language (HDL) code depends on the size of the code. Apart from having an interesting experience in graphical programming approach, the LabVIEW FPGA module could be used by application designers to facilitate and accelerate the development of FPGA-based systems.