This week was a weird one. Hot off the heels of our demo, I was pretty motivated to work on some more of my implementation, and since the software stuff is mostly done, that meant building out some SystemVerilog (finally). However, there was a more pressing matter–I flew home for the rest of the semester this past Thursday, so we needed to ensure that all our hardware worked before we were all separated. This meant I needed to build a…
This week, I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that I could get the hardware working and get my parts of the product properly synthesized. In terms of going from MIDI keyboard press to usable data packets for the audio processing units, I have almost everything in place. I also ended up writing up the top-level module for our project to connect all the pieces we currently have together. This module currently integrated all the code that I…
This week, I implemented the hardware description of the wavetable oscillator. To do so, this also required implementing ROM and the fixed-point unit in hardware. All of these transitions went quite smoothly, and the wavetable oscillator has been verified against my software model and they produce identical outputs over hundreds of thousands of clock cycles. I am starting to dip into expected slack weeks this week, but I plan to hopefully get a lot more of the hardware description completed…
This week, we worked hard to get each of our respective components into something demo-able. Eric was able to show a software simulation of the display. Manav has the entire MIDI layer SystemVerilog code debugged in simulation and was working on transferring it to the FPGA. While he wasn’t able to get this done by the demo, he made a lot of headway learning about how to interface with the GPIO pins on the FPGA. Joe was able to write…
Sorry this is late 🙁 This week, I got a lot done. All of the code for integrating the APU has been written and mostly debugged. I also started writing the Wavetable oscillator, fixed point unit, and RAM in SystemVerilog. This is the current status for the APU integration: The software APU is able to modulate a signal using Wavetable oscillator and the LFOs. Theoretically, it would be able to use the envelope generators but they aren’t written in fixed…
This week, I worked pretty heavily on getting everything ready to demo. This means that the software display interface is finally done! Now, all I have to do is write it to hardware, which (I hope) is not going to be too hard. I don’t know what else to put here, since you guys saw the majority of my work 🙂 This week, I’m focusing on testing all the hardware components with an Arduino. I want to make sure I…
This week, I finished up developing the RTL for the MIDI decoder and got a chance to move onto the synthesis portion of this project. Through the use of simulation tests, I know that the MIDI decoder now works properly, and can try to run on the FPGA. I got a chance to create the circuit for the MIDI keyboard and connected it to the FPGA. I also got a chance to setup the FPGA and ran a couple of…
This week, I worked on trying to get all the necessary components ready for the demo on Monday. This meant writing a lot of software before we wrote any hardware, since we plan for the demo to be completely based in our software co-simulation environment. The encoders, I can say proudly, are finally done–after talking about the parameters that they hold and control with Joe, I have finally settled on a system that will allow us to have the correct…
This week, we have all been working towards making working prototypes for the upcoming demos. Manav has been working on being able to show we can decode simulated MIDI inputs. The MIDI keyboard came in this week, so he is able to sample real inputs for testing, though this might not be feasible before the demo. Eric has finished the encoders module and is working on demoing our display. He won’t be able to demo the real LCD screen yet,…
This week I mostly focused on finishing up developing the RTL for the MIDI decoder. This is part of the code that I plan to get finished for the demonstration this coming week. I have yet to get it 100% working at this moment, but my goal is to properly decode the bitstream that comes from the sample as an input to the MIDI decoder module. This week I finally got access to the MIDI keyboard that we ordered, so I…