This week, I researched into the peripherals we were considering using for our project and further refined the design. More specifically, we met with Prof. Chang on Monday, who suggested that we consider adding a small receipt printer to our design so that museum-goers could walk away with a copy of their encrypted message. I spent time researching into printers that could communicate via UART, and I found some resources that demonstrated using it for Arduino, which could be useful for implementing on the FPGA. Ultimately, we decided against the printer after having our weekly meeting, but the time spent researching more into the GPIO pins on the FPGA & UART protocol could be useful in the future.
Additionally, after receiving feedback from our proposal presentation, Amelia & I met to discuss how we could move more of our functionality onto the FPGA. We researched into the different FPGAs available to us, and saw that the DE0 Nano has 2, 2×20 GPIO pins, which would be sufficient for all of our peripherals given that we use shift registers. We also looked more into the documentation for the FPGA and evaluated whether we could use the existing micro SD card on-board, but decided it wouldn’t be feasible since it is reserved for boot-loading. After meeting with Tanisha as well, we decided that we could implement the entire design on just the FPGA.
I am on schedule since we are finalizing our design, the peripherals that we will use, and the communication protocols we will implement. This week, I help to finalize the design presentation, specifically refining the technical requirements with more quantitative values. I will also do further research into the microSD card reader and power consumption since moving fully to the FPGA, and will begin working on the PCB layout once the schematic has been changed to reflect our new design.