This week, we have made good progress towards integrating the PCB with the FPGA. Tanisha finished soldering the PCB and fixed one LED that was not lighting up by bypassing the trace and manually connecting an external wire/resistor to another output of the last shift register, which had unused outputs. She has verified the rest of the traces for continuity, setting us up for success when combining with the FPGA. One small issue is with the orientation of the rotary encoder, which we will need to finalize for aesthetic/functional purposes.
On the RTL side, Amelia and Nancy still have to work through some bugs with how the rotor settings are displayed on the external 7 segment display rather than on the DE10’s. We also hooked up the pins involving the display and the rotary encoder to the PCB and it was working the same! This was a good sign since we were concerned about if the FPGA’s 3V3 pin would be sufficient to power the PCB, but since the 7 segment display worked while all LEDs were illuminated, we should be good. We also got the lampboard to light up corresponding to our input from the PS/2, but still have some work to do with getting the output to display instead.
Finally, Amelia also worked on the housing for our FPGA & PCB. This was our solution to the loose header pins on the FPGA preventing us from getting a reliable connection. Since we are now using jumper wires between the two headers, we needed the PCB to be elevated above the FPGA, which also added some needed stability! Today, Amelia successfully laser cut the pieces and we will glue them together this week.
