This week we made some large breakthroughs. Initially we were planning on using an Arduino since we had many available to us and they are relatively easy to program. The only challenge with this is they use 5V logic and the Voltage Controlled Oscillator we are using uses 3V3 logic levels meaning we need to convert them. We attempted to use the Sparkfun Logic Level Converters however the method of switching they use were not fast enough to support the slowest SPI speed of the Arduino. My team members considered using a Raspberry Pi since it uses 3V3 logic levels so I wrote a quick Python script to configure the VCO in case they did end up using the Rasberry Pi. Due to accessibility issues my team members ended up not using the Raspberry Pi but had a Ti MSP430 available to them which uses 3V3 logic levels so we attempted to use that. It looked promising since there was an IDE called Energia which used Arduino libraries to program it so the code I wrote this week should work. Unfortunately we had some issues setting up the development environment for that chip and none of us had experience with the platform so we moved on. My team members were able to borrow an STM32 Nucleo board, a platform with which I am very familiar with, so I rewrote the program to set the VCO registers for this microcontroller and we were able to get it to working and use it with our downmixer.
I spent a lot of time this week writing the code to program the VCO (for multiple microcontrollers) and next week I will start on the heatmap and webcam capture code.