Weekly Reports

Fall 2018 Weekly Reports

Spring 2019 Milestones 

 

Week 1 (January 13th – 19th)

Agenda:

  1. Discuss our plan for the semester with Dr. Mansouri
  2. Decide how regularly we need to meet
  3. Ask any other questions regarding our design
  4. Hand in Design Document for feedback.

Minutes:

  • We are going to work on interfacing talking between the FPGA and Pi
  • Do we need to buy another FPGA, that is not attached to the board?
    • Research cost of these
    • See how much of the ZED board we are using so we can purchase the smallest possible FPGA possible.
  • Ideally, we would like to have the MOSIS chip be a direct plugin
  • Talk to Jared about creating a PCB as soon as possible.
    • Brainstorm what connections we actually want to put on the PCB
  • Our first priority should be how do we want the FPGA to talk to the Pi
    • FPGA has IO pins… hopefully, we can just use those pins to represent the pins of the MOSIS chip.
    • Add a proper handshake since we have extra pins?
    • If the MOSIS chip ends up having a bug we could have a software patch for when we insert the chip in the summer/when it comes back
  • Use the switches on the zed board to do the testing for now
  • Look into the IO extenders.
  • By Tuesday the 29th we need to get the Raspberry Pi to talk to both the FPGA and LED matrix (all the 3 units talk to each other)
    • At a bare minimum, if we cannot get LED matrix in time, ensure the Pi can talk to the FPGA

Progress Report:

This week consisted of a lot of planning and discussions for the upcoming semester. As seen above in our meeting minutes we discussed with our advisor what our immediate concerns should be for this semester and what information we need to research and look into. We also set a deadline of January 29th to have established communication between our FPGA and Pi. We determined that we would most likely not get the LED matrix in time to meet this deadline, but will try to establish communcation with it soon after all the needed parts have arrived.
Our plan for next week is to work really hard and meet multiples times in order to make progress on the testing of our Verilog code on the FPGA, as well as establishing communication between the PI and FPGA. We as a team have determined that we want to push most of our work to the front of the semester so we can get a working prototype at least halfway into the semester. This way it ensures we have time to fix any errors and issues we run into.

 

Week 2 (January 20th – 26th)

Progress Report:

This week we made a lot of process on the implementation of our design. We were able to talk between the FPGA and Pi, as well as download and test our Verilog program on the FPGA. The milestones we achieved are documented in more detail on the page “Spring 2019 Milestones (click the link at the top of the page). This was a very big week for team Battlechip and we were able to confirm the Verilog design we created last semester worked as intended without changes needing to be made. While we did not have an official meeting with our advisor we stopped by her office a few times to keep her up to date on our achievements this week. In addition, we ordered a handful of parts that will go in our final design (LED matrices, Rasberry Pi 3B+, Pi zero W, and various other products to power the devices)
Our plan for next week is to keep working on our prototype. Since we have verified the functionality of our FPGA by outputting the desired information onto the Pi via a laptop screen (see milestones page), our next goal is to integrate the Pi and FPGA as we intend for our final product. This will involve continuing to develop our python program that will control the Pi 3B+ and getting it to communicate with the FPGA. We would like to get the game working with the PI sending back the required signals, but still displaying the outputs on the Pi screen within the next week or so. After this has been achieved we shift focus to interfacing with the LED screens.

 

Week 3 (January 17th – February 2nd)

Progress Report:

This week we continued to work on interfacing the FPGA and the Pi. We also started brainstorming the pseudo code for the main game loop on the Pi that will control what is displayed to the LED matrices. Other than that we did not get much done, due to conflicting schedules and class work.
Our goal for next week is to set up a demo for our February Project Review on Feb 8th. The goal of this demo is to demonstrate to the class that our FPGA works as expected and that this is the same functionality as our MOSIS Chip. We also need to create a presentation slide and prep for our meeting with our industry advisor.

 

Week 4 (February 3rd – 9th)

Meeting Notes (Industry Advisor):

  • Notes on Design Document
    • make a note that for our power on we are planning on creating a PCB that the silicon chip will be connected to
    • For power on, we need to generate a test plan
      • Flip the switch and no smoke
      • a certain pattern/test all the functionalities we are interested in
  • 3-tiered power step down
    • Regarding having 1 power cord to power each device
    • 120AC –> 5v (5 –> 1.2,0.9) (5 –> 1.5)
  • WIFI Communication?
    • Matt made the note that for real industry projects this would not fly (cost would come into play, etc…)
  • What is our plan for cooling all the devices in the case?
    • Put a 5V fan in it??
    • Power supplies are more sensitive because of capacitors and some have fluids (so we need to make sure they are effectively cooled)
  • Notes about the B2Spice Schematic
    • we should overlay blocks that describe what each part of the schematic does.
    • This gives more actual information than just “wow i see logic and its complicated”
  • We don’t need to synchronize the clocks on the Pi and the FPGA, we should be fine

Progress Report:

This week we worked on our demo for Friday, Feb 8th, as well as our presentation. We were able to demonstrate to the class how our FPGA functioned and explained how we planned to proceed for the rest of the semester. In addition to focusing on the presentation, we continued work on the main game look in our Python program for the Pi
Our goal for next week is to continue working on our main game loop as well as researching FPGAs to buy.

 

Week 5 (February 10th – 16th)

Progress Report:

This week we made significant progress on the main game loop. We have approximately 60% of our game loop coded and tested with communicating to the FPGA, excluding the communication to the LEDs.
Our goal for the end of next week is to have our game loop completely finished and also have our LED interfacing being started. In addition to this, we would like to have all our parts ordered or at least researched and ready to purchase when needed.

 

Week 6 (February 17th – 23rd)

Progress Report:

This week we completed the initial full implementation of the game loop. This was a big step for the team, and it gets us one step closer to putting together the full initial working prototype. We had planned to meet with our advisor this week but due to a last minute conflict, we had to postpone it to next week.
Our goal for next week is to research and order all the parts we will need, so everything has arrived after spring break (which ends on March 10th). We also want to establish an initial ad hoc network between the 2 Pi’s, to ensure that our current plan of communicating the data will work. We also want to determine the need for a PCB in our final product. There are many small tasks that need to be completed this week to ensure we stay on track for our Founders Day deadline.

 

Week 7 (February 24th – March 2nd)

Progress Report:

This week our team hit a lot of milestones. The biggest achievement that happened this week was that we were able to power on the LED matrices and write sample programs to the display panels from our Raspberry Pi. This is a was a big achievement because it allows us now to move forward with displaying our actual design onto the LED matrices. In addition to this achievement, we also decided on and ordered most of the buttons that will go into the final product

Next week is spring break and over that time Kristin is going to lay out the schedule for the rest of the semester to ensure we can complete the project in time for founders day. The following week when we come back we have a lot of different tasks we need to complete in order to stay on track for founders day. Below is a list of the tasks we need to accomplish in the one or two weeks following spring break:

  • Test the push buttons once they arrive
  • Get the Pi 3B+ and Pi zero communicating with each other and sending the required information via wifi.
  • Download and test the Verilog program onto the new FPGA that was gifted to our team by the Shiley school of engineering
  • Begin designing the final case in solid works
  • decide if designing a D-pad in solid works is worth it or if we should just use 4 buttons for moving
  • display our project onto the 2 LED matricies (not just sample programs).
  • Have a rough working prototype of the game on LED screens with both Pi’s and new FPGA