This week, we finalized the major requirements of our project during our design presentation on Wednesday. One of the most significant decisions was to use the DE10 Standard as our FPGA platform, since it includes a built-in CODEC and audio output. We also selected the specific MIDI keyboard we plan to use.
After the presentation, we discussed the possibility of decoding USB signals directly on the ARM core within the FPGA rather than using an external breakout board. The main advantage of decoding signals on the ARM core is that we can write the interface in C, which would significantly improve our ability to iterate and debug quickly. However, a major concern is that the ARM core may be significantly slower than a dedicated breakout board and could become a bottleneck in our system. Our current plan is to begin by using the ARM core to decode USB signals so we can get control signals onto the FPGA, and then transition to a breakout board later if performance becomes an issue.
Daniel is responsible for establishing communication between the ARM core and the FPGA fabric, and he began working on this connection this week. Meanwhile, Shayaan developed prototype oscillators for all the waveforms we intend to generate. He verified the functionality of each oscillator through visual inspection using the waveform viewer.
Next week, we will focus on writing our design proposal paper. One key piece of feedback from our presentation was that our design requirements were somewhat unclear, so we will ensure they are clearly and explicitly defined in the report.