- Searched for FPGA/microcontroller options that were available for purchase
- Found out that FPGA chip on a custom PCB would most likely be a difficult option. I was restricting the search to Altera chips (and non-BGA if possible), and found that most chips were out-of-stock or too old so that any recent version of Quartus does not support this.
- The search was restricted to Altera due to my prior experience in 341/240.
- Looked into a microcontroller that would have UART/SPI, that would enable communication from the FTDI (USB-UART chip) to the lasers. Filled out a purchase form for a MSP430 Launchpad. Estimated day of delivery was Monday if it were ordered yesterday.
- KJ and I both have experience using MSP430 in the past, which is why we narrowed down the search to this.
- We decided to get a dev board to test out its capability so we can make sure that it can support at least the 4Mbps communication to meet requirements.
- Found out that FPGA chip on a custom PCB would most likely be a difficult option. I was restricting the search to Altera chips (and non-BGA if possible), and found that most chips were out-of-stock or too old so that any recent version of Quartus does not support this.
- Work is on schedule, although the unavailability of FPGA chips were unexpected and I would need to iron out the plan of handling the communication.
- By next week, I hope to come up with a way to validate whether the microcontroller and FPGA dev board can support the communication requirements, and choose which design to proceed with based on this.
Anju Ito, Roger Lacson, and KJ Newman