With the impacts of COVID-19 on the course and our project, there have been additional risks that need to be managed accordingly. With the closure of TechSpark and campus as a whole, manufacturing and assembly became more difficult, especially since not all of us were located in the same place. Akin to PCB printing, there exist laser-cutting services that can accept provided design files to produce and ship out custom parts. We leveraged one of these to produce the laser-cut parts for the controller. This introduces some additional cost to our project since we had originally only accounted for material costs, but since we were operating well under budget to begin with, this was a minor concern.
We had ordered PCBs prior to spring break, so we were able to get them shipped from campus before campus was entirely closed. With some assistance, we were also able to procure a soldering kit and some solder from campus as well as the rest of our parts from the labs to be able to assemble the boards in Pittsburgh.
For remote development, we were able to have FPGAs shipped to us individually from campus. We have settled on using the DE2-115 for its LE resources, seeing as the area constraint imposed by the DE0-CV was difficult to overcome. We had already been using a Github repository for version control and to share code, so working remotely has had minimal impact on our ongoing RTL development.
Overall we believe we are one of the (lucky) groups that will be able to complete our project with minimal impact from the ongoing pandemic. We have set up weekly shared work sessions to help with integration, but that is something we will continually evaluate moving forward.
Please see our individual status reports for updated Gantt charts.