Chronicles from our peeps.
Now for real, the circuit is finished, and I have started with assigning and creating the footprints for the components. There are no one major updates this week, but rather a lot of changes and modifications to the schematics. As usual, here is the visual diff for this week. Additions Read more
This week I started to integrate everything together starting from the generation of the C++ code by the user up to the creation of the final bit stream. It’s the time to get every part of the project work side by side with each other. Verilog top module and EMACS: Read more
Good news everyone, the circuit is finished 😀 ! Well, not so fast! Now everything is connected, but there are some last minute modifications to the circuit that were introduced just now. I will work on those first thing next week, and hopefully, I will start with the PCB layout. Read more
This week is pretty challenging, I was assigned on task of putting a CPU into web application. The first thing to be done is to analyze the code of the CPU, it was written in pure JavaScript. The Best Way to Learn JavaScript I found out that the previous learning Read more
Progressing from where I stopped last week, this week I had to finish everything up and make sure that everything works as it’s supposed to. Before I go in details and describe what I have done, I have to clear some stuff that were left from last week up regarding Read more
I was interested to find out how much storage is needed to store the bitstream of a minimal design for a Spartan6 FPGA. The minimal design chosen is just a straight-forward 8-bit binary counter. The results are: LX25 Raw/Compressed: 801556/233934 LX16 Raw/Compressed: 464290/134942 LX9 Raw/Compressed: 340697/118773 The sizes stayed the Read more
Hello everyone, my name is Ayman and I am doing my Final Year Project under the supervision of Dr. Shawn Tan. In my first blog post I will describe my project, what I have been doing in the past weeks, and what I will do next. The first paragraph is Read more
There are a whole bunch of JSON v XML posts out there. So, I will not rehash the various arguments on which is better. However, we needed to select a file format to store configuration information. To make things convenient, we decided to use the Boost::Property_Tree library. So, this is Read more
I continues working on the schematics this week. By now, almost all the major components in the circuit are connected. Last week I connected the Ethernet jack, SD card, and some of the microcontroller connections. This week I did the connections for the USB port power pins, FPGA I/O ports, Read more
In our PCB, we have an FPGA, and PIC18 microcontroller. It is our intention to share one oscillator between the two ICs, hence reducing the cost, and sparing the PCB precious area. This post will discuss the problems that might occur, and what configuration we are using. Problems can occur Read more