Progress
This week we worked together a lot on preparing for the midterm demo. We worked heavily on integration and testing, and have put together many of the pieces that we had together on hardware. The MIDI interface has been pieced together and completed, fully tested on the FPGA hardware itself. We have been testing by putting successive pieces of the pipeline together, and as of the time of writing this, we have tested the synthesis pipeline up to the decoder and synthesis incrementors, and are working on testing the mixer and the DAC pre-prep modules. We do not anticipate having the effects chain tested on the FPGA board itself for the midterm demo, and have been focusing on the wave blending effects in testing this week. The group as a whole has been working together, so rather than a lot of focus on each of our individual pieces, we have been debugging and testing together.
One issue that has come up this week is the possibility that we may need a digital low-pass filter on-board the FPGA before the DAC due to potential aliasing effects. We will run experiments on the DAC output this week to see if the issue necessitates it, and if it is necessary, I will begin the design of the filter.
Scheduling
The amount of progress we made this week on integration and testing means we will not have to spend as much time later, since the stages of the synthesis pipeline that we have working after this week will not need to be revisited later. My goals for next week are to begin integrating the effects modules and effects chain into the synthesized hardware pipeline. Assuming we can get the basic synthesis pipeline functional early next week, I can begin tuning the effects as well.
