This week I spent a large amount of my time working on the design report. The first few days of the week I spent writing about half of the report in order for Xiran to be able to edit it later. While I was able to draw from our slides, much of the work for the report was expanding on the details mentioned in the presentation. I also looked through the feedback given to us from both the students and the instructors to ensure that their concerns were addressed in the report. I also made some final revisions on the report before we turned it in.
Ali and I also worked on getting the NOIS II ethernet demo working. We ran into a lot of issues this week in trying to run the demo. Firstly, the different versions of Quartus that we have on the lab computers versus the Quartus Lite that Ali has on her laptop have caused some discrepancies between the program we are trying to setup. I think that we are close to being able to run the demo on the board. However, this has been a much more laborious process than expected and unforeseen setbacks could keep popping up. Our hope is that once we get the demo to run, we can modify the code from the demo to do what we need.
Given this difficulty, we also have been investigating other methods for getting our input and output to and from the board in case we need to abandon the ethernet protocol. We have about 2MB of memory on the DE2-115 FPGA board, which we are looking into using to preload our inputs to the program.
This upcoming week, I will also be working on the Ethics assignment and adding an Ethics section to our design report for the final.