Unfortunately, this week did not go the way I planned. I worked extra days to cover a few leaves I plan to take later, thus with more time spent on work for the week, I should be accomplishing more. However, this is one of the cliche time when quantity does not bring anything without quality.
I planned to finish my buzzer design and get it working including its test bench. I wanted to design the code to be implemented on FPGA with a clock divider module. I got the chance to ask Dr. Shawn to clarify the operations of the schematic circuit that I found difficult to understand. This was the time I realized how everything was so wrong on my previous design which in turn failed the test bench. I built my design but it was such a bother that it took me quite a long time. There were a few lines of the codes which I was not sure of as I wrote and implemented it in a slightly different way.
I learnt more on arithmetic logic unit, how the computer carries out the operation of arithmetic and logic, in this case, the pre-loadable down counter to be implemented on the buzzer chip. I studied even more when my design failed, to the point my head was only thinking of overflow flag, carry flag, manipulating the bits of the register created in order to have the overflow or carry bit, ways to retrieve the value of that bit and sending it as an output. One could never be sure of the chip design made without fully comprehending the operation. I just continued to check the design on my test bench, there were no errors and it behaved in a way that the counter do count down the value in it and when it hit the last value, it reads the value from the data register.
Although I saw the hope that my design might just work, when I run the code in Xilinx and used iMPACT to be implemented on FPGA, the design could not be synthesized. I created a design where the were limitations to be executed for synthesizing. Therefore, I was then back at designing the codes again. Since it got me down with my progress, I checked to see if the design I made before this for the 7 Colour LED could have worked on certain modules of the same characteristics. I tested two of them and they do work with the same design. For now, there are only few sensors done out of all the 37 sensors and I still have the Wiki documentation to correct as the next task, which should have already been done. I just hope I can cross more sensors off my list a lot faster as I am very much behind schedule now.
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