This week, one of the things I’ve worked on is assembling the PCB for our project. We then connected the FPGA to power, and everything seems to be working correctly so far. We were able to see MIDI coming into the board on the oscilloscope. Here is a picture of the board while powered on:
I’ve also looked into the FFT further. As it turns out, there is an IP core FFT for the Cyclone V. It seems as though it would work well for our purposes, and would make the implementation process much easier. It seems that we would still have to manage the memory that this IP uses, but that we can easily just pass in samples in natural order.
Finally, I also looked into the display driver more. The display uses a SPI-like interface, and takes data in one bit at a time. It should be relatively easy to write a driver that can send out data in the required format. The harder part is going to be embedding a state machine in hardware that sends all of the required commands to the display. The documentation for the display is not the best, so it is unclear exactly what commands need to be sent to write to pixels on the display. The datasheet for the on board driver chip may be more useful in that regard.