This week we got a little behind schedule due to the Design Review Report. We spent much more time than expected on the Report, leaving some of our other tasks unfinished.
The biggest risk we currently have to our project is the communication protocol. Ali and Grace are trying to implement Ethernet by first getting one of the NOIS II demos working. However, this has proven to be a large hassle given the different amounts of Quartus errors and version issues. We are hoping to get the demo to run this week and then edit the existing code for the demo to do a simple echo test. Editing the code should not be too much of an issue, but we are unsure how many other unexpected errors will we get in actually running it.
In the case that this protocol is unable to be created, we are planning on resorting to USB or JTAG since their interfaces are much easier to deal with. We also, as mentioned in our design report, have been looking into placing all of our inputs and outputs directly into memory bypassing the need for a communication protocol. However, this will require much changes to our system, so we are not looking at that as our first backup.
We’ve also moved back the development of the DUT to focus on the report.