Week Two

This was the second week being an Intern at Aeste. At the start of the week, Dr Shawn explained the overview of the main project that I would be handling during this internship. One of the tasks were to eventually interface a few other popular FPGA’s with the PIC microcontroller on the board aside from the already interfaced Xilinx Spartan FPGA. This would require investigation and research on the required information such as bitstream format as well as programming protocols. Alongside this task, was to eventually remove the ethernet port and instead utilize the already installed USB to connect the hardware to the web. This would also require research on information such as web USB and RNDIS protocols. I hope to finish my research before next week finishes.

Before I would research on the above, I was first tasked to go through the source code and issues list. After going through and getting a general idea of what it is, I was then tasked to build the source code on the MPLAB-X IDE as well as setting the Harmony configurations. There were some path issues with some of the header files as well as an outdated version of Harmony being used in the source code that caused some build errors which I managed to fix up. With the source code successfully built, I would have a good baseline to continue from with regards to my project.

Another thing, I was tasked to do before research was to practically apply the FreeRTOS library API’s to the PIC32 starter kit development board. After going through the documentation, I applied the API’s such as tasks, queues, semaphores and mutexes on the board’s LED’s to visualize and understand inter-task communications which would be needed for my project later on.

Lastly, this week, all of the interns were tasked to help Dr Shawn in auditing the security of several machines of two clients. Going through the checklists and guidelines, we were able to finish early. Certainly, a breath of fresh air doing it. All in all, a great week but a little anxious of the weeks to come. I’ll definitely need to learn and understand new concepts faster and implementing them as well.