This week had been exciting for me as now I have the Digilent Atlys Spartan 6 board to play with. Dr. Shawn taught me on USB over IP, to have the board connected to the server. Before doing anything, Dr. Shawn instructed me to go through the reference manual of the board first, this is very important as the connection of the jumpers should be checked before the board gets turned on.
Besides the board, now I also have the sensors to work on. Dr. Shawn bought a kit that comes with 37 sensors to be programmed. I hope I get to get it all done by the end of my internship. It came with Chinese documentation but I got the help from another intern here, Kevin to check that I translated everything correctly. Google translate can be unreliable sometimes so I just needed someone to check anyway. The kit comes with various kind of sensors and how the sensors work were really interesting to learn. There was even one that is called Magic Light Cup module. I classified the sensors into two separate categories, analog and digital to make it convenient to program them later.
Having the sensors classified, I proceeded in learning how to configure a clock divider in Verilog as I wanted to test the board with LED as the outputs. This means having to go through the software Xilinx and making a user constraint file (ucf). I did not understand about the ucf format at the beginning that I edited it incorrectly. I read up more on the methods of post synthesis in Xilinx as well as downloading the bit stream using Impact. As soon as I get the codes done later, I really hope the LED indicator will work as it should thus I get to continue with using the board to program all those sensors.
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