Complete WLAN Solution for AVR and CPU

The project illustrates the use of Atmel AVR microcontroller based system with a Prism WLAN interface.

There are two approaches by which this project can be achieved and it includes a pure software solution known as Procyon AVRlib which signifies that the entire compact flash communication timing in software will be done by AVR. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is slow, unreliable, and will consume several I/O ports on the AVR. The other approach is a WLAN hardware add-on to the Ethernet board that utilizes PCMCIA WLAN card and an FPGA to achieve hardware supported reliable transfers.

The final design was based on a prism chipset based compact flash WLAN card which is connected to the AVR CPU using programmable logic chip. The entire system was named SPI2CF project since the CF card is attached to the AVR using the SPI interface.

There are three main function blocks that comprise the entire system that includes the AVR as the central CPU, the compact flash WLAN card, and a XC9572XL CPLD that translates the SPI interface to connect to AVR and parallel interface used on the compact flash slot.

Rest of the project