FGPA elevator controller

I know doodley-squat about FPGAs, except that it means "Field-programmable Gate Array. I know there are big programmable logic chips - if you can get one of those with registers, you could build your controller in the form of a state machine. :-)

Good Luck! Rich

Using an FPGA would be exactly the right way to do things if you had an elevator that could move from one floor to the next 100-1000 nanoseconds. Since that implies an elevator that's only moving between

1/3 and 1/30th the speed of light I suppose it's not totally impossible, as long as you don't mind accelerations that can reach between 2 and 200 trillion times gravity.

As long as you have an elevator that takes a few seconds between floors the sensible way to build an elevator controller out of an FPGA would be to trade the FPGA for a tube full of 8051's and start writing code, so you were partially on track. From this observation, and the wording of the question, this sounds an awful lot like a school project, and the end of June is coming up.

Have you asked your prof?

I suspect that what you are expected to do is to figure out the logic required to make an elevator work, and to implement that logic on an FPGA. If I were a prof asking the question that's what I'd be thinking.

------------------------------------------- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services

I think I remember Knuth in his 3-volume set "The Art of Computer Programming" has a detailed algorithm for an optimal elevator. My copies are buried here somewhere or I'd provide volume and page.

Hello Tim,

After people get these kinds of unrealistic assignments at college some unfortunately end up trying that in real life later.

I wish they would hand out more down-to-earth assignments like they used to in the good old days. Well, at least sometimes they did.

Regards, Joerg

Probably the simulation in _Fundamental Algorithms_, 2.2.5. Elevators make a reappearance in _Sorting and Searching_ 5.4.8, but as a model for something else, not as the focus of interest.

Anno