In my last update, the main goal I wanted to tackle was figuring out what to put on the FPGA, since we were discovering some crashing issues when loading the CPU too much and also installation issues regarding OpenGL. So we decided to make an architecture change, such that the FPGA platform will only perform the fluid simulation algorithm. In other words, it will take an array of 3D positions and output an array of 3D positions for each frame, and save that to a file such that a host computer that is able to run Scotty3D can load in the simulation file and play the fluid simulation.
The major task I accomplished for this week was stripping the fluid simulation code of extraneous dependencies such that the number of files loaded into the Vitis HLS would be minimal. I also worked with Jeremy and Ziyi to rewrite portions of the code that were using modern C++ features, and am currently working on loading a text file of 3D positions into keyframes for the animatino. I am making good progress already and am confident that I can finish this for next week.
Next week will be critical since we have a demo coming up, so in addition to getting the text file loaded into Scotty3D I will be working on figuring out the FPGA–> host computer communication. Since we have finally gotten the Vitis HLS project to build, I am feeling great about our progress going forward.