David’s Status Report for 2-19

This week, I dabbled in many different aspects of our project that also happened to strike a good balance between solo work and team work. In our team sessions, the most important things that William and I did for our group was we fleshed out our communication protocol and choosing algorithm to an extent. We determined our packet structures and the different types of packets we would be sending. William and I also did some research on the differences between our requested Raspberry Pi 4 and the RockPi that Professor Tamal suggested we should take a look into. We ultimately decided to go with our original request and I put in another request for 5 more FPGA boards to make sure we can guarantee having enough boards for our final product. On the solo work side, we had two main large issues in figuring out how to maneuver around the Binance API and how the mining would actually take place, so I decided to research into both of these. For the Binance API, I read into their online documentation. For the mining, I tried to configure the open source fpga miner I found during research, but I kept running into various issues like trying to run windows commands on linux, quartus not working properly, different compiling issues, etc. I managed to work past all of these issues, but I ran into a different issue where that source code used a deprecated way of getting work, so I need to find an alternative to test or create my own before testing. Overall, I’d say I’m on track where I’m a little ahead on some tasks but behind on some other tasks. We also had a team meeting where William and I basically wrote the team status report and delegated slides for the upcoming Design Review presentation.