In the last week I wrote our group’s proposal presentation (see the proposal section of the blog) and did some implementation related research. We also met as a group a few times to spend a few hours figuring out more specifics of our design – in particular, where the boundaries between our roles will lie and how they will interface – and also to discuss possible alterations to our proposal. At this point, our next major steps are to nail down our design as specifically as possible and put together our design presentation. Regarding scheduling, this point in our schedule is still dedicated primarily to research, and I’m happy with my progress on that front. I’ve had some success with figuring out possible ways to work with components we’re unfamiliar with.
Seeing other groups’ proposal presentations this past week was very illuminating. In light of the fact that several other groups have proposed to do some amount of video processing with an FPGA – something we had originally been interested in but were discouraged from early on – we are reconsidering this as an option and doing some research as to the feasibility for our project specifically. In particular, the concern is how we’ll be able to get data onto and off of the FPGA, especially image/video information. Since we still need to be able to communicate over the internet with our web app, we are currently assuming that we will still need something like a raspberry pi to pass messages back and forth. With regards to communication between the FPGA and rPi, I’ve found an internet project that could be promising to pass wired signals between the two. It focus on simple signals, but I believe the system it describes could be expanded. It also talks about doing this in parallel, which will definitely be something for us to take advantage of in order to achieve the highest possible frame rate. This is something I will look into further this week.