An Angry Moose in Silicon Valley

By Joseph Xavier | Nov 25, 2015

Angry Moose is Nuvation’s Canadian version of Angry Birds, but we chose the real world instead of a video game as the best place to play – with a real catapult, and real animals (okay, real stuffed toy animals). Instead of tossing birds into blocks, we catapult beavers (what else eh?) through beer cans to knock down the forest critters who stole our Moose’s beer (which made him angry…). We 3D-printed the catapult, created an iPad GUI, and run the catapult’s motor controls with an Altera Cyclone V SoC FPGA.

This Fall Nuvation brought Angry Moose to the Altera SoC FPGA Developer Forum (ASDF) in Santa Clara, CA.

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How Does Angry Moose Work?

  • Receives commands from an iPad app via an isolated Ethernet network
  • Turns those commands into register writes to control four independent custom designed Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) generators
  • PWM generators control four external Texas Instruments Jaguar motor controllers

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Angry Moose FPGA Architecture – Click to Enlarge