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Josiah’s Status Report for 10/5

Accomplishments

This week saw the conclusion of the design review presentations and reviews, and I’m happy with how our project is shaping up. Alongside the completion of the design review presentation, I created our team’s Bill of Materials in a Google Sheet, and populated my page with the materials required for the XY robot. I put in an order form for the majority of the materials, and will look into 3D printing parts to house the robot provided in the Autodesk Instructable guide.

As I become more familiar with the design, the more I expect that having the KRIA take the place of the Arduino may prove difficult. In this case, UART would be a good communication protocol between the two devices–we’d only actually need to send the landing coordinates to the Arduino to handle motor controls. In other words, just one piece of data.

Progress

This next week, I hope to have the materials arrive and begin construction of the actual robot. I’ll need to do a bit of 3D printing, but the models are already available for download so this shouldn’t take long. Additionally, I’ll be working on helping to complete the design review report, due October 11th.

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Gordon’s Status Report for 10/5

Besides helping write the design review presentation and listening to everyone’s presentation while giving feedback, this week parts that I ordered last week arrived, and I worked through understanding how all of them work together and tried to setup the KRIA on a machine so I could get started. Last week I found a display port to display port connection that would connect to the spare monitor in HH1307, but unfortunately I couldn’t find it again this week. Looked around in the 1300 wing, went to A104 and ECE receiving as well but to no avail. Thus I had to send in another order for that cord, and unfortunately could’t progress with actually setup the KRIA. What I could do was test the cords that did arrive, and I verified that I had everything besides the display. 

 

The display port will put the output of the KRIA onto a monitor so you can see what’s happening, so since I didn’t have that output cord I couldn’t really continue. But what I could do was make sure I fully understood everything else that was interfacing with the KRIA, which there were a few. I consulted Varun for any clarifications I needed and compiled this table below that showcases all the wiring coming in and out of the KRIA.

 

Port connections I need Do I have it? Port Usage
Power Supply to outlet Yes Powers Board
Ethernet M2M Yes Transfer files to run on KRIA, all coding will be done on my laptop and be sent over
MicroUSB to USB Yes Unknown usage, confirmed by Varun it’s probably unnecessary.
Micro SD cards Arrived Flash PetaLinux and Ubuntu onto two separate mircoSD cards, so upon plugin the KRIA SOC can read and use the OS
USB Mouse @ home Interface I/O
USB Keyboard Yes Interface I/O
Display Port M2M Ordered To display KRIA output onto monitor

 

I’ve identified everything that’s needed, read up more on Varun’s guide as well as the AMD KR260 setup guide, and determined how I will proceed next week once all the components are together. Unfortunately not being able to do much today puts me a little behind on schedule, but that works out a little as this week has been quite busy with other work. Once the parts arrive next week, my workload should also have cooled down a little and I will be able to catch back up. I’m aiming to have the first thing I do to catch up be to connect up the KRIA and run an example project. During this time I can also study up more on Varun’s guide on how to setup the Vitis and Vivado software.