Progress This week I began to look at function application, and also fix PEMDAS on the interpreter and smoothen everything out for the final demo. My group decided that it would make more sense for me to focus on polishing the interpreter this week so that we are in good shape for the final demo, and work on functions on a different branch. I was a little busy this week with other classes, so function application is a little incomplete,…
Progress This week, I got the firmware to be code complete, but I wasn’t able to debug it yet because we didn’t have the tiles prepared. So, Eric and I spent the rest of the week cutting out pieces of the tile, drilling holes in them for the sensors, and gluing them together (see Eric’s status update for images). We are also in the process of soldering the PCBs. By Monday’s demo, we hope to have at least some aspect…
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). I helped Melodee to get the firmware working on the tile. Currently the communication layer appears to be fully working. The following video demonstrates the tile sending the message 42 to its neighbor and then receiving the message 42 back. https://photos.app.goo.gl/JkAQCH757ZkJdQmE6 Now…
Risks Most of the technical risks have been resolved now. The few that remain are very small, but untested. Our target clock rate could be too fast. We have only tested 10Hz so far. This works, but we have not tested 1KHz yet. We run out of time soldering together the remaining 26 tiles. I am confident that we will have enough time if the digikey parts arrive soon. Changes Last week, we were unsure whether our own personal wood…
Progress This week, I mostly worked with Eric to complete the C++ hardware interface. We ran into a few roadblocks while writing it, including limitations in the ATmega328p’s memory. However, as of today the interface is done and I can now move on to writing the firmware. Since writing the hardware interface wasn’t as great of a bottleneck as we had anticipated, we decided that I no longer needed to write the tile simulation. A significant contribution that I made…
Progress This week I continued work on the display/GUI and introduced a top level module so that the translator (reads in input from the master tile, TODO, interpreter and the display can interact). The top level module is very simple for now, but I have yet to add the deserialization code to it. I will see if this deserialization is more suited to a different module (translation) or whether it should happen in the top level itself. As for the…
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). I soldered together 4 PCB’s and tested the circuit to confirm that the IR communication works and that the reflective sensors can distinguish between black and white. Melodee and I experimented with various woodworking techniques to assemble these enclosures and were able…
Progress This week I worked on creating a display/GUI. This will be run as soon as the master tile sends an input stream to the top module (coming soon). The GUI will show a display of the tiles read in, what each tiles is (from the encoding), error tiles highlighted in red, and output of the program on the side. The GUI also allows for “user input”, if we add a corresponding CodeBlox tile. Since I’ve never made a GUI…
Risks Embedded: The biggest risk we have is that the C++ hardware interface will take a while to make; this would delay the start of writing the C++ firmware. To mitigate this risk, Melodee and Eric will write a C++ tile simulator (similar to the Python tile simulator), which should be quicker to write. It will allow Melodee to write and debug the firmware earlier. Tile Enclosures: A risk we foresee with the tile construction is that the slight differences…
Progress I wrapped up my work with the Python version of the firmware in the beginning of the week. It can be found in the python_firmware directory of our repository. Eric and I then moved on to working in the C++ Arduino environment. We spent a day learning C++ (since we need to do more advanced things with it than what we’re used to). Then we began working on writing a C++ interface to the hardware to decouple the firmware…