John Paul Harriman’s Status Report for 2/15/2020

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

A lot of the work I did this week was formally putting our meeting work together into a digestible format. I also did more thorough research on what specific error correction code we were going to use since there are multiple benefits and drawbacks to each. LPDC was our frontrunner in the beginning, but we are now shifting towards Turbo Codes since it has become the space pseudo-standard.

You can check out my formal proposal for such a use here.

I also went ahead and re-verified the parts we were using before our plan of purchasing in which I added a new, necessary peripheral in order to act with our microcontroller, which is a USB to TTL connection to help interface with the SMT Microcontroller via UART.

Our group collaborated on what our overall structure is going to be, but I formalized it here.

Our group collaborated on what our overall API is going to be, but I formalized it and reformatted to a more UART-centric format here.

The Turbo code formatting is not well-documented on it’s implementation so that is where the majority of my week went into. Figuring out how exactly to implement this ourselves and deciding whether this will be a viable solution in the long run.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

According to our initial Gantt chart, we are behind on our progress. We are planning to do order our parts as soon as possible which will allow us to begin our deployment onto each component. The other is while we are waiting for our parts to ship, we hope to do a pre-simulation without outside peripherals which will only be functions running within the command line. We have allowed ourselves a little slack since we initially planned for a sequential implementation instead of parallel, but I would personally like to be much further along in the project.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

My deliverable for the next week is to submit the order forms for all the necessary parts. Then start with a base implementation of I2C that will allow passing of data frames between two instances running. Then be able to add error insertion into the protocol through a middleman instance, which will finally be able to detect error. I’m limiting just to error detection for now so that we can establish our upper-bound of our error correction, which is just asking to send the packet again.