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For right now, as a first step, I'm just receiving video from a board camera (ov7670), storing it in a 2-port ram that is being used as a frame buffer (but is using the extremely limited FPGA memory). At the same time the VGA entity is pulling the pixel data from that frame buffer when it needs it and displaying it on a monitor. That's it. Really simple but I need to use SDRAM. I can only store a 160x120 frame with this limited FPGA memory. I don't mind going through a QSYS tutorial to build what I need but it sure seems like I don't need NiosII nor do I need JTAG...
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Its quite possible that you don't need to use a processor, it really comes down to how much intelligence is built into your existing components.
For example, how is "I'm just receiving video from a board camera" implemented? From the looks of the ov7670 data sheet, its a VGA interface. I haven't used VGA, but from the data sheet, it looks basically like a streaming data source. In Altera's world, it can probably be considered an Avalon-ST data source, or it can be manipulated to look like one. You could write that data to SDRAM via a DMA controller, or perhaps some of the Video IP blocks, I have never looked at them, but others on the list should have.
Perhaps start a new topic asking how people deal with VGA data streams, and SDRAM buffering, since that is more specific to what you are really interested in.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
