Gary’s Status Report for 30 March 2024

Progress

This week was yet another firmware refactoring adventure, this time in pursuit of getting the SD card working. The reason this required refactoring was because of how Rust handles sharing of objects, specifically sharing the SPI interface handle. Previously, the entire SPI bus was a single struct which was solely owned by the Display struct, but the issue is that this provides no way for the display to share the SPI bus with the new SD card handler, which also needs to use the same bus. The solution to this comes in the form of a whole lot of refactoring: Carson ported the hardware abstraction library to a newer version of the standard HAL interface which will allow (somewhat clunkily) sharing the SPI bus, and I began working toward integrating this with our code, which ended up requiring modifying several of the libraries we use (the reason for this mostly boils down to the libraries using an old implementation of Mutex which had been superseded).

Planning + Pacing

Tomorrow, the plan is for me to work (possibly with Carson) on finally getting the SD card working. I don’t have any other homework urgently pending so I think this is totally doable to get it done by the interim demo. Adding the SD card will allow us to demonstrate location logging and dynamic map loading: those features should be straightforward to implement once the memory card itself works.

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