System Snake on the Nexys 4 DDR

Post date: Mar 15, 2016 8:52:37 PM

Video demonstration of project.

Project Snake. Unfortunately, I became very preoccupied and didn't put forth the time in completing Project Snake, an earlier Zynq project consisting of PL-defined hardware accelerators for driving the Zybo's audio codec and VGA interface, and the ARM Cortex-A9 processor running PetaLinux. I still want to revisit this project in the future, but for a different game.

A somewhat edgy, albeit mostly pointless picture of the Nexys.

System Snake. For now, though, I decided to reinvent the project as System Snake, the classic snake game implemented entirely in System Verilog for the Digilent Nexys 4 DDR board. In addition to its Xilinx Artix-7, the Nexys 4 includes a number of other peripherals, such as an accelerometer and Ethernet, but only the VGA, 8-segment displays, and pushbuttons are utilized in this project.

The game itself behaves as one would expect for a snake game: the snake grows as it consumes what I call score, the snake's current direction cannot be reversed, the game ends if the snake collides with its body or a wall, etc. Links to the source code from my GitHub can be found below.

Code. The GitHub page that corresponds to the project can be found here.