My work on the passive buzzer had entered its 4th week. I did not like that 4 weeks means a month. When days become weeks, and weeks become a month, you know your work performance is not doing good and you need to do something about it. I wish I was able to do it on my own but at the end I still needed help from Dr. Shawn to finish. Dr. Shawn checked my codes and asked me to modify certain parts where I could have wrote it better with a different statement.
After doing some modifications, I ran a test bench and the counter part was working as it should but few other signals were not. Dr. Shawn corrected my codes while explaining how the design should be working. Then, I verified it with the test bench but the buzzer still did not produce sounds when tested on the FPGA board. I was sad again. Dr. Shawn said that it was because of the frequency that was used for the buzzer and that I should check my clock divider codes. True enough, I did not divide the frequency low enough to the range that can be heard. After some calculations, I corrected the parameters of my clock divider module and finally, I heard a 2 kHz sound of happiness. Well, a range of frequencies around 2kHz since it produced different sounds depending on the inputs. I had fun playing with it that I might have annoyed other interns there. I don’t think they would consider it a sound of happiness. I wanted to hear it since a month ago already, was just too glad it eventually sounds.
Since the design was working, I made few modifications to it to observe which would be the best in terms of its speed and size. The results was easily compared with the help of Xilinx software that generates a detailed synthesis reports. I also made few small corrections to some of the previous module designed. Now I am eager to proceed to the next module.
I had a presentation of my internship with Dr. Shawn as well. We had a good talk as he gave some very useful advice on presenting besides giving valuable constructive criticism. It was good to know my areas of improvement, such as my skills and work product. I hope I will be able to improve myself further in the future.
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