This week, I brought up the HPS, HPS-FPGA communication over AXI, and implemented a MIDI state machine in SystemVerilog which can parse a stream of bytes.
These system integration tasks tied together all the work in the synthesizer core that the team has done so far into a platform ready for a polyphonic music demo which could play public domain MIDI tracks that other people have written.
Notably, the MIDI track was from a live input as though it were coming in from a MIDI controller like a keyboard. I was able to stream MIDI from my personal laptop and hear the synthesized output from the speakers. I only used command line tools that came with my system’s default package manager which aligns with the goal of the WaveShaper to be compatible with already existing technologies.
This is a first step in driving the synthesizer modules that we have designed outside of testbench environments. This coming week, the same will be done for the ADSR envelope and the filters in a custom CLI representing the software core.
As you’ve designed, implemented and debugged your project, what new tools or new knowledge did you find it necessary to learn to be able to accomplish these tasks?
I had to learn Quartus II’s Platform Manager and U-Boot.
What learning strategies did you use to acquire this new knowledge?
I usually read documentation, but many of the linked documents provided by Quartus 404’d. I had to filter through old university course labs to try and guess how to write up the IP blocks internally in Quartus correctly.