What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

• Finalized the inter-tile communication protocol with Melodee
  • Result: The protocol should be able to work with only three simplex communication channels per side 
• Wrote a tile-to-tile python simulator for Melodee to use to implement the tile’s internal state machine and prove the communication protocol.
  • Result: The simulator allows you to connect arbitrarily many tiles together and configure them with any encoding.  Each tile operates in its own thread and the tile firmware class very closely resembles the arduino run-time environment.
• Did some simple calculations to determine our minimum clock frequency to meet our timing goals.
  • Our clock period must be at least 1.37KHz.  The clock period must be less than goal / ((2n +3n(n+1)2)w) for the case that n tiles are connected in a line with a word size of w.  The 1.37KHz clock comes from n=20and w=9and a goal of 8 second compilation time.
• Tested this clock frequency with a visible light LED and a photoresistor on a breadboard with a square wave generator and an oscilloscope.
  • Result: I could only reach about 300 Hz before the receiver could not keep up with the square wave.  This may be potentially problematic.

 

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).

I did not take any photos of the clock speed analysis, but here is a screenshot of the working api for the simulator I wrote.

 

Here is what the firmware file looks like.  This is meant to look just like an arduino starter file with two registered interrupt handlers on the clock pins.  This code is replicated in a unique thread for each simulated tile.

 

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am behind on designing the circuit, but that is a result of getting ahead on the tile simulator.

 

If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

I would like to order the main components that I need for the initial prototype circuit today to put me back on schedule.

 

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

Flush out an initial prototype design circuit, and test a battery backup circuit on an atmega328p.