Jullia Tran’s Status Report for 3-27-21

Last week, I spent my time writing the Design Report. I spent time on writing specifically the Architecture Overview, Design Trade Studies, Pyramid Materials and Pyramid Design. I also spent time on writing parts of other sections.

For this week, I spent time writing the image decoder, two sccb modules for FPGA, and a top module that wire these modules together. I then met up with Breyden to debug the full pipeline so that we have the flow of data from the FPGA going out into the VGA monitor. When we were debugging together, we realized that the i2c protocols using the FPGA wasn’t quite working correctly. This could be due to a number of things noise from the wiring connections. After debugging for a while, we decided that it might be easier to use the I2c protocol directly from the Arduino Uno because this was easier to debug. Breyden then took over and debugged some more after this when the issue becomes the color settings of the camera doesn’t quite follow what we expected from the specs sheet after we have set the settings to output RGB. We also worked out together how to instantiate the BRAM and interfacing with this type of memory from the FPGA. We now have a BRAM 2-port buffer that we read and write into so that we can output this data into the VGA monitor. However, we are currently facing the issue of the color not quite being as accurate as it should be: we have RGB565 settings for the camera and decoding in this scheme but the frame seems to be black and white. We are currently trying to handle this and hopefully will have it for next week. As of the progress, even with this issue we are facing, we are still on track because we have accomplished some of the tasks needed to be done for later along with debugging and testing.