This week we started integration between our various subsystems. Alton’s music module was designed to be standalone so integration was very simple. Eric’s network stack was more complex, and is still in-progress though we were able to get a first step done. At the moment we have a Sender board that just produces valid packets and a Game board that is running the full multiplayer implementation. The Game board receives the garbage packets from the Sender and it seems to work well. The rest of the data still needs to be generated though this will come through when the rest of the Receiver is integrated into the boards.
A surprise was that the DE2-115 can be powered via GPIO. Notice in this image that the top board has no wired connections other than the ribbon cable on the right. The left side of the board has no power nor USB programmer connected. By default the programmer doesn’t allow multiple .sof files to be loaded this way, though it would be really cool if it did.
This is how we are testing the integration. The two boards are stacked with a ribbon cable connecting the GPIO of the top and bottom boards.