Author: utran

This week, I work on preparing the Design presentation. I researched for the materials of the pyramid as well as the mechanism of how it works (Pepper’s Ghost with ray optics). Using my research for the previous week, we agreed on the OV7670 as our camera and integrating this to our design. Breyden and I looked into the specs and the pins connections to flush out our solution to this problem better. Notably, the camera gives us a constraint/ requirement of GPIOs pins that we must have for our FPGA board, which is around 18pins * 4. The camera also provides us with the FOV, 25˚, which is needed in our computation for the size of our studio. I looked into the measurement of the monitor also and we decide that a 55” TV would work after calculating the dimension required for the 4-5x enlargement of our object. Using this information, I created some of the slides for the presentation.

My work on the presentation mainly includes the creating System Overview diagrams, diagrams of the construction of the pyramid and the setup for the live studio. I helped with some of the calculations for the physical designs (the live studio dimensions, the dimensions of each picture frame, the dimensions of each pyramid panel), as well as talk with Breyden about the System Overview design. I also helped with deciding on the FPGA board that we will be using through weighing our trade-offs between available/required logic elements and GPIO pins.

Also, I spend some time rehearsing the presentation. I also met with the professor to go over our slides for this presentation.

At the beginning of this week, I worked on reviewing Grace’s presentation to prepare for the Proposal Presentation on Monday. We discussed pacing, and the points we should mention for each of the slides. Later this week, I have researched some of the materials for constructing the pyramid. There seems to be many ways to build this pyramid such as glass. However, after considering the size that we want this to be constructed as and how it would be very difficult to construct and cut into. It seems that the other way, which might be what we will be pursuing for our design would be to use plexiglass panels since these are cheap, light and comes in big sizes. As shown in this link here, this material maintains the holographic effects, while  has the potential to be scaled bigger.

I also looked into some cameras options for our design. At first, we have the options of choosing between USB, NTSC or VGA protocol to interact with our board. We think that between the three of these protocols, VGA might be easier to implement. I looked up some of the potentials options for VGA cameras and the OV7670, OV7725, or OV5642 all seem to be very viable options to meet our budget, as well as the specs for our requirements. The OV5642 seems to be much more expensive than the other two, however with 60fps support in the specs sheet. The OV7670 only has 30fps as mentioned in the specs sheet, however, it seems that we should be able to clock it up to 60fps. This camera model also seems to be more common amongst people who use FPGA with this camera as comparing to the other two camera. The OV7725 also seems to support 60fps but not a lot of people seems to have used them. Because of this, the OV7670 seems to be a viable solution for our requirements due to its cost, and widely used by people with FPGA interactions.

Over the course of this week, I helped Grace work on the proposal presentation, specifically the solution approach and the system overview where I also discuss with Breyden to come up with some of the details for the design. After finishing the presentation on Thursday night as a team, Grace and I met with Professor Kim for feedbacks before our presentation on Monday. One of the biggest feedback was on the technical challenges slide, where we didn’t focus only on the biggest hurdles. We adjusted this slide accordingly, and also the division of work slide. We also finalized our Gantt chart. This up coming week, I hope to help research more about the different cameras available that have an interface with the FPGA so we can start ordering the parts. I also hope to look in to the use of PLLs with Breyden so we can think more deeply about our implementation design.