Protect Your Home With a FPGA-based Alarm System

Welcome back again FPGA addicts! Today we have a very interesting and useful project for you: Build your own alarm system with your FPGA.

This work was carried out by a group of students and it could perfectly serve as a baseline for any alarm system.

The project is developed in 6 easy steps. All you need to replicate it is the following: a FPGA (they used an Altera DEs-115 Cyclone IV), an IR Beam Break Sensor, an Arduino LilyPad Buzzer, a breadboard, some wires and a pull-up resistor. As you can well infer there is some minor manipulation in this project which is always funny and distracting. Cool stuff.

The alarm system is comprised of three modules: the main module, the display one and the sound module. The FPGA runs all the code. It receives information from the IR Beam Breaker Sensor and controls both the LED display to show whether the alarm is armed or not and the buzzer. The functioning of the alarm is quite simple, if the alarm is armed the LEDs will display “ON”, during this state if the IR beam is interrupted then the buzzer will go off and make noise. In any other state the alarm won´t activate and so there won´t be any acoustic sign and you won´t know if someone broke into.

All three modules are explained in detail, thus this project represent a very nice learning document both for system design and coding, even though all the code is given (but you should only use it as a way to check your work).  You can find all the files here.

It´s interesting to highlight that the code for the noise of the buzzer is based upon the code of a Music Box developed using a FPGA.

Let´s get hand on and wire up your house!

By TeamCaffeine