What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
For this week, I wrote a system to address the streams that are sent to the FPGA. This is needed for the FPGA to identify where it should draw a picture when it gets a frame from the central ESP. With the addressing scheme in place, we are now able to run 6 simultaneous streams at once and have them all show up in the same place.
In addition, I also added some pacing code into the central ESP as well. We need to pace the frames at around a 20-25ms interval since the FPGA only has one instance of the decoder and it runs sequentially. It therefore can only accept a new image to draw every 20-25ms. Since it is much easier for the ESP to buffer this data, we decided to have the pacing and buffering code on the ESP side.
The last loose end that needed to be cleaned up was to black out the unused picture locations. At 720p we have divided the frame into 12 individual 240p streams. Since we are not using half of them, we need the ESP to send a black frame on initialization to those locations to make the system look nice. Without sending the black frame we will just get random colors in the unused locations which just looks bad.
Finally, I also integrated the whole system with Varun. We were able to get all 6 streams working simultaneously. The video below is of the system working with all 6 streams. Note that the code to black out the unused locations is not active in the video.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J4ZgzfkFmw4zAhaMK7OQOmpwzOf-8wDz/view?usp=sharing
