Author: ameliahe

This week I have been really busy with other classes so I am a little bit behind on the progress I said I would make for the final poster. I plan to have it finished before the deadline. Although I am a little off track from where I said I would be last week, since I have most of next week to focus on the final demo, I plan to be back on track quickly.

In terms of other things I accomplished last week, I finished multiclient testing and started to think about the optimization of triggering text completion with a hot key press that doesn’t require the client script to run in the background.

This week I worked on developing user tests and finalizing the client script to work for multiclient. There were some bugs when we tried to integrate more than one user that required me to update the client script to set more flags to communicate with the FPGA. We also decided to do more focused user testing to try which revealed a few more bugs that I fixed.

Our project is essentially done, I am on track. My goals for next week are to start working on the final report, video and poster that are all due next week.

This week I have been working on debugging my client side code as we ran into some bugs while integrating multi client. I’ve also been working on a script to install all necessary dependancies for new users. All code can be found in my github.

For next week, my goals are to have the code fully debugged and to start doing some user testing (currently Anirudh and I have tried out multiclient but it would be good to get at-least one more concurrent user tested). I also plan to start working on the video that we have to include in our final presentation. I am on track however this next week looks busy so I plan to try to get all of the code debugged asap to stay on track for the final two weeks.

This week I worked on finalizing the client communication with the FPGA based on how Anirudh and Andrew configured it (in terms of where data ready flags are set and where output data is sent). Although we have accepted that there will be some resource starvation in our multi-client implementation, I ensured that when the client accesses the flag that signals the FPGA is ready to receive data, that is an atomic action that prevents other clients from simultaneously trying to send their prompts. This also simplifies the process of ensuring the correct data gets to the correct user, since now the only client who will be looking for data from the FPGA will be the one whose request is being processed. I also updated the lua script to read the FPGA data out of a file the python script scps back to the client device. Everything on the client side is now ready to be integrated with the FPGA side. My repo with the code I’ve been working on can be found here.

I am on schedule and completed everything I planned to complete this week. My goals for next week are to have successful interim demos and also integrate my scripts with the hardware.

This week I focused on getting the UI script to automatically ssh into the fpga and then read an “in use” flag that tells the program when the FPGA is available to send a new query. The main challenges with getting this all working was that the client script needed to concurrently check for the “in use” flag and also the input from the user when the lua script is triggered.

Here is a link to my github repo for the code so far: repo

I am on track in terms of getting my scripts ready to integrate with the FPGA and met my goals set last week. Looking forward, we plan to integrate next week, so I can’t say for certain what I plan to work on but my main goal is to get a functional integration of all of our work together so that we have something concrete to show for the interim demo.

This past week I did not do anything since it was spring break. The week before last I focused on getting the design review done before the Friday deadline. I did not spend as much time getting comfortable with the Vitis EDA tools as I had planned, however, I’m sure over the course of the next few weeks, having hands on exposure will be enough for me to figure things out. I therefore accomplished one out of my two goals from two weeks ago.  I think I am still on schedule.

Given I have quite a busy upcoming week, I plan to focus on figuring out how to pull power data from our new FPGA and also look into multiuser authentication as an extension to our UI. I expect these to be manageable goals for the upcoming week. I would also like to spend some time organizing our website.

This week I focused on getting the UI ready to be tested by users. I learnt the basics of LUA and edited Anirudh’s original scripts to support a text preview and then the user can either accept the auto complete or regenerate the response. The UI now utilizes two hotkeys – cmd G to prompt the model and cmd L to remove the output if it isn’t what the user wants. I wanted to get the UI finished early so that we can start preliminary user testing (likely after spring break).

The other main thing I was focused on this week was watching/reading some Vitis tutorials to learn how to synthesize softcores on our new Kria FPGA.

Goals for next week:

1. make significant progress on the design review report as that is due Friday
2. Spend more time getting comfortable with Vitis EDA tools

I started off this week setting up the DeepSeek model I downloaded last week. While very interesting, after using the model and trying to find a way to prompt it to do text completion, I found that it is very much a chatbot with visible chain of thought. Therefore, we decided to stick with our original model.

I then pivoted to getting our UI set up on my computer, which required some debugging. I wanted to make sure the set up scripts were working because I plan to conduct some preliminary user testing next week. I quantified our metrics for usability, deciding on a setup time of at most 15 minutes and a benchmark of 100% success for users to reject or accept text completion suggestions, which is one of our system requirements. Finally, I worked on the design review presentation, making final block diagrams and quantifying technical design requirements.

The specified need our product will meet with consider of social factors is that it levels the playing field in terms of who has access to AI tools that support more efficient workflows for individuals. While many people can use text completion copilots to speed up their work, those working in data sensitive field cannot. This leads to a disparity across groups of who has more time to spend on more skilled aspects of their job, or more free time to spend doing other things. By enabling greater access to copilot tools, our product effectively enables greater access to better uses of time for a greater number of people.