Voice Shifting With A Cyclone V FPGA

Cornell Students [Sean Carroll], [Gulnar Mirza], and [James Talmage] designed a realtime pitch shifter to run on their DE1-SoC and controlled by its ARM core.

The team’s goals were to pitch-shift the left and right outputs independently, to produce chords using the original voices as well as the pitch-shifted ones, and time-delayed pitch shifting. All of it is controlled on a VGA monitor through a simple GUI, allowing users to create lots of different effects by layering the different options.

Under the hood they made use of dual circular buffers to do the pitch shifting, reading in the sample and then using simple fixed-point arithmetic to modify it, then running the signal through a Butterworth filter to clean up artifacts.

The project was built as part of [Bruce Land]’s ECE5760 class. If you’re looking for more DE1 goodness, you’ll find excellent projects aplenty on Hackaday, including the LED Matrix Audio Visualizer from last year and Synthesizing Strings on a Cyclone V, among many others.

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Quality Assurance Through FPGA

[Claire Chen] and [Mark Zhao], students in [Bruce Land]’s ECE5760 class at Cornell, created a project aimed at the manufacturing sector: quality-checking manufactured products automatically by visually scanning a bunch of them and processing the pixels one at a time. Ordinarily, the time when the widget comes off the line is when you have to bring in actual people to inspect. This project uses morphological image processing to like dilation and erosion to look for flaws.

[Claire] and [Mark] created a simulated manufacturing line with a servo-driven belt that brings a series of Spree candies into the range of a camera, which scans them. The SoC with a Cyclone V FPGA and ARM Cortex-9 then processes the raw images to establish the object’s color, while running it through a couple of algorithms to look for defects. The FPGA tracks how many Sprees that have passed by as well as their color, maintaining a 99% success rate with a rate of 5-10 frames per second. The FPGA also looks at each blob of color as a collection of pixels, establishing connectivity to help to distinguish multiple Sprees touching each other.

Also be sure to check out [Claire] and [Mark]’s bike sonar project from a previous semester.

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Synthesizing Strings On A Cyclone V

Cornell students [Erissa Irani], [Albert Xu], and [Sophia Yan] built a FPGA wave equation music synth as the final project for [Bruce Land]’s ECE 5760 class.

The team used the Kaplus-Strong string synthesis method to design a trio of four-stringed instruments to be played by the Cyclone V FPGA. A C program running on the development board’s ARM 9 HPS serves as music sequencer, controlling tempo and telling the FPGA which note to play.

The students created versions of four songs, including “Colors of the Wind” from the Pocahantas soundtrack, “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” (Cornell’s alma mater) and John Legend’s “All of Me”. A simple GUI allows the viewer to select a song and to choose which instrument or instruments to play, providing multiple variations for each song.

Thanks, [Bruce]!

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