Team Report

Changes to schedule:

We’re catching up and for the most part maintaining the pace that we set over the past few weeks. We accounted for a reasonable amount of time spent this week towards the design reviews, so we don’t have any current changes to our schedule.

 

Major project changes:

At this point we don’t have any major project changes since we’ve just finalized our project design for the most part. We still have some concerns about the DSP pipeline mapping correctly onto the DSP slices, and that’s something we’ll keep in mind and re-evaluate after implementing the first stage of the pipeline.

 

Brandon:

2/24-3/2

For the third week of work on the project, we mainly focused on the design aspect of the project, as we had to present a design presentation as well as write a design document. Since I was presenting, I mainly had to focus on this process rather than spend a lot of time working on the actual project. Thus, I didn’t make as much progress as I was hoping to make this week on video streaming functionality. However, I was able to get OpenCV to work so now I’m at about 50% completion on the video streaming tests before we get the actual hardware. Speaking of the hardware, I also submitted the order form for three Raspberry Pi W with Camera Packs (see below), which we will be able to start working with once we receive them. Some technical challenges I was able to overcome included some weird UDP behavior over multiple machines, and simply installing and working with OpenCV. The steps I took to accomplish this was again, a lot of online research and various forms of testing.

I’m still behind schedule, since I devoted most of my time this week to the design aspect of the class, but I should be okay, because I’m planning on staying in Pittsburgh over spring break, so I’ll be able to catch up on anything I don’t finish then (currently, I don’t have anything scheduled on the Gantt chart, so it’ll be an opportunity to catch up). The deliverable I hope to achieve in this next week is still getting video streaming/sending functionality working completely.

Ilan:

Personal accomplishments this week:

• Started working on bringing up FPGA and ARM core. Still working on finalizing infrastructure and toolchain so it works for all 3 of us.
  • Had to work through temporary obstacle of powering board since we didn’t have a power supply, so we ordered one for ourselves as well as one for another team that wanted one.
  • Future work involves finishing bring-up, pushing infrastructure up to GitHub, and documenting toolchain for Brandon and Edric.
• Continued researching steps of Canny edge detection in more depth with Edric to prepare for design review, but we weren’t able to finalize DSP slice allocation for each stage. This was brought up as a flaw in our design review documentation, so we put some time toward this during the second half of the week and will be finalizing that as well as hopefully a clock frequency target for the design that we can include in our design report. We’re still trying to work through the algorithm and better our understanding which has been a bit of a challenge.
  • Future work will be finalizing the DSP slice allocation and determining target clock frequency.
• No progress yet on implementing interface functionality, but that’s scheduled for the upcoming 2 or so weeks, so that’s fine.

Progress on schedule:

• Edric and I continued to make progress on understanding the algorithm and designing the pipeline. We’ll be finalizing this over the rest of the weekend and the implementation will start over the next week or so.

Deliverables next week:

• Finish enabling ARM core and FPGA functionality and pushing toolchain up to GitHub and documenting setup.
• Finalized DSP slice allocation and target clock frequency.