I thought an interesting project to do since I knew how to get characters to display on a VGA monitor and since I had written a UART interface in VHDL would be to build a UART terminal. The UART terminal receives input from a UART port and displays the received characters on a VGA monitor. When connected to the PC’s serial port, it echos the text on Window’s HyperTerminal software. 

Specifications

• A cursor is used to indicate the current location.
• The screen starts a new line when a “carriage return” code is received.
• A line wraps around (i.e., starts a new line) after 80 characters.
• When the cursor reaches the buttom of the screen, the first line will be discarded and all the other lines move up one position.

The entire project was written in VHDL and tested on a terrasic DE1 Development board. The code can be found here.