Chronicles from our peeps.
This week I was mostly double checking all the connections and also all the footprints. There were a few footprints that needed to be modified and rerouted. The I/O ports connected to the FPGA were also rerouted, this time using the differential tracks instead of single ones. That opens up Read more…
Finally, I managed to finish the routing of the board. After changing the width of the board and having to move the digital ports to fit the new board dimensions, I had to redo most of the connections. Routing the board for the second time was much faster as I Read more…
This week I was given a new task, in order to carry out this task I had to learn a few new things. First I learned how to set up a Raspberry pi, which requires installing an operating system (Raspbian) on an SD-card. This procedure is explained in details on Read more…
This week when I tried to open the project, I faced a number of errors. This was caused because we have upgraded the systems at our office and the new version of Kicad could not recognize most of the libraries and models in the project. In order to fix this, Read more…
This week I spend most of my time assigning the footprints to each component and repositioning all the components on the board so that all the newly added digital ports can fit in nicely and be accessible. There are a total of 78 digital pins and 12 analogue pins available on Read more…
This week I spent most of my time finishing up the schematics. The updated board will have 2 complete SPI and 1 complete UART connection, between the PIC32 and the FPGA. The PIC32 pin availability for these connections can be checked from harmony configurator in MPLABX. You might need to Read more…
I started the week by looking at alternative power supply designs. The problem with the current design is that it utilizes 2 bulky linear voltage regulators. There are many single chip solutions for the 3 voltage levels required. However, they are not really cost effective, thus can not be used. Read more…
This week I managed to replace the FPGA, FTG256 with TQG144. Replacing, or in other word migration between FPGAs with different densities is not very hard as long as they fall under the same family. In this case since they are both Spartan6 XC6S, the pin names and functionalities mostly Read more…
This week, after some more reading about the board and the connections and also some more reading on PCB design, I started using Kicad. Which is a very powerful PCB design software and it can be used for highly complex projects. After watching a few tutorials online and going through Read more…
This week which is my third, here at Aeste, was more about reading and understanding the current board. I started the week by redoing the Board Architecture that I worked on last week. At the time I did not fully understand what was asked, so I ended up doing it Read more…