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Grace’s Status Report for 12/4

Thanksgiving week, Ali and I continued our work on serial communication using UART. We changed our code from using the standard of 1 byte per packet to sending or receiving three packets in a row. Even though we only need to send 16 bits to the FPGA and receive 20 bits, we have to roundup to the next largest byte for padding. Therefore, each time we send or receive, we need three bytes. We were able to make this successfully send and started setting up the code to connect to the DUT that Xiran made.

This past week we continued setting up integration. We also tried a couple of different methods to increase speed and checked to see if using a different laptop would allow us to send at a higher rate. However, unfortunately, we couldn’t seem to go faster. Then we looked into other methods to send our UART protocol and decided to look into using a raspberry pi. We are hoping to setup using the pi this upcoming week.

I also plan to spend time this week working on our final report and video. Additionally, I want to plan out exactly what we show in our demo and poster.

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Team Status Report for 12/4

The biggest concern is still regarding communication, but we are now a bit more concerned about the timing. The fastest baud rate Ali and Grace’s computer can handle is 512,000 bits/second which doesn’t scale for larger instruction quantities. Additionally, the library they are using is relatively slow to read data from the serial cable. They are thinking of switching to using a raspberry pi to handle sending data to the FPGA because it should be able to send data at a faster rate, and it might be easier to use a linux operating system rather than a windows operating system for communication. Ali picked up the Pi on Friday, and has an SD card coming today. She and Grace will be playing around with it later this week to see if they can increase speeds.

Arguably, we’re very happy that UART is basically working — especially compared to all of the issues with Ethernet.

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Ali’s Status Report for 12/4

The most important update from the past 2 weeks is that UART works!! We can successfully send the FPGA 60,000 bytes of data in a row (and it can be sent back correctly!). Grace and I are very close to finishing our end of communication (as in, we need to handle some file I/O to be able to read the test vectors and then write the results from the FPGA to a results file). We’ve planned out this code but haven’t written it yet for 2 main reasons: first, my laptop died when we were writing code and I forgot my charger, second, I’ve been studying for a final on Tuesday. Regardless, we’re very confident that everything will come together pretty easily.

We’ve found out that the maximum baud rate when sending from my computer and Grace’s computer is 512,000 bits/second. This means that for 20,000 instructions, we have roughly 2x speedup, but it’s not very scalable. Additionally, when doing some testing, I found that with the code I’m using to send and receive serial data, it takes a relatively long time to read the data that is sent back to the PC. We have a few ways of addressing this: first, we can try running the sending/receiving portions of the code in different threads. We are also hoping to try using a raspberry pi which can 1) theoretically allow us to send data at a faster rate, and 2) use a different library to send/receive serial data which can reduce some of these latencies.

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Xiran’s Status Report for 12/4

Yay! Last status report!

For the past two weeks, I worked on a few different tasks. During the week of Thanksgiving, I finished our input GUI (below is a screenshot). I also worked on the final presentation slides and practiced delivery, given that I was the presenter for our team this time. This past week, I practiced the presentation more and am beginning to work on integration. More specifically, I need to update the output comparator to accept a slightly different file format that Grace and Ali are working on sending from the FPGA.

I am on schedule. I’m at a point where I’m essentially done with all of my individual tasks for the semester. During this final stretch, I’ll work with my teammates on integration, more testing, plus the final deliverables.

To Tamal and Joel, thank you for your help throughout the semester 🙂 See you at our demo!