This week was a very nice change of pace. The three of us talked on Monday, and we decided that it would be best to switch to serial UART for several reasons. 1) It is a better documented protocol 2) Prof. Nace has a lab where students do some UART communication 3) No Nios!!! 4) There are more examples of projects which use UART 5) We can interface with the serial port without using a socket — and can use something like PuTTY to send data (which should be easy).
I spent a lot of the earlier portion of this week looking through the lab handout that Prof. Nace sent me, and I also looked through different UART protocol documentation. Today, Grace and I implemented the lab that Prof. Nace has, and it worked! We did not synthesize because we aren’t sure if we have the needed to files to synthesize the sender board. We are currently waiting for a serial to USB cable to come in so we can easily send data from the PC. Hopefully, the cable comes this week, and we can interface with it this week. I think this will be a much better alternative than Ethernet. I think this week will be a bit hectic, but I finally have a lot of confidence in communication!