Team Status Report for 4/2

The largest change in plans has to deal with configuration switching on the FPGAs. We can change the synthesized design on the boards via command line with Quartus Programmer, but Quartus only runs on x86 processors and the Raspberry Pi has an ARM processor. This means that the Raspberry Pi will not be able to tell the FPGAs to switch from one cryptocurrency to another. Our current solution to mitigate this risk is to upload a configuration file to a remote server accessible by both the Raspberry Pi and code running locally on one of our laptops. Using this, we can parse the remote file to reconfigure the FPGA boards. The design for this new solution has incurred an additional cost in the purchase of a ten-to-one USB hub so that all of the boards can be reconfigured from a central location. 

The decision making process and the code that talks to the mining pool is largely complete. The decision tree can be heavily improved, but that will be put on the back burner for a little bit so that the entire project can come to life in time for the demo.

The most significant risk lies in the GPIO communication where we continue to wait on progress there. 

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