Engineering Elegance

FreeRTOS Memory Heap Problem

This week I pushed my basic FreeRTOS port onto a release branch on GIT (yay) as functionality is good. It’s very simple. It has 3 apps related to USB, FPGA and TCP/IP. The USB CDC app task maintains the state of the driver and creates another task whose job is checking the status of certain global variables and printing messages to the COM port accordingly. The second app is merely one task which transmits a bit-stream to the FPGA through bit-banging after which the task is deleted and Read more

By [email protected], ago

Of SegFaults and Compiler Errors

My progress with building web applications with Witty was kind of unpredictable. Some of the days I was able to complete most of the functionalities of a web page while on others barely anything could be accomplished. I guess this is what happens when one gets stuck in the cycle where at one end you will be able to accomplish something quick as it has been done before while at the other end you spend hours trying out a new Read more

By Jia Jen, ago

Not as Smooth as I’d thought

Week 5. I continued working on utilizing FreeRTOS for our board as last week I had done a very improper implementation. In my inexperienced eyes, everything was working, but more and more issues were appearing. That’s when Dr. Shawn took a look at the chaos I’ve created. Basically I didn’t understand well enough how an RTOS works, and my implementation was bound to crash. Therefore I had to go back and read more of the documentation as Dr. Shawn told me my Read more

By [email protected], ago

Progress Won’t Happen Without Struggle

Using one word to describe this week’s progress, that would be the word SLOW. Or more accurate, SLOWEST! The week however, just passed so fast. I was disappointed when I realized it was already end of the week and I have achieved nothing. Nothing – Not a thing, design code still not working, test bench failed, buzzer would not produce even the slightest sound, definitely. I made a change to the clock divider module that was made before this for Read more

By [email protected], ago

To FreeRTOS

This week I was tasked with migrating our PIC32 code so it would use the superior FreeRTOS architecture instead of a superloop. Having no experience in FreeRTOS whatsoever I began by skimming through the first 3 chapters of documentation to get me started. Later I simply enabled the FreeRTOS third party library in Harmony Configurator which automatically setup almost everything for me  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ minus some minor adjustments for function priorities/delays. The real hassle was getting everything to work properly when put together. A single program would Read more

By [email protected], ago

Buzzer : Active or Passive, It Must Sound

I started off this week by designing the code for a passive buzzer. It was quite a simple task as I only made a few changes compared to the previous design made, they only have outputs that needed to be sent without having to read the inputs. I ran my codes  but to my disappointment there was no sound coming from the buzzer at all. Just silence. The frequency range that humans can hear are from 20 Hz to 20 Read more

By [email protected], ago

Effort is vital. But the key to make all the difference is knowing HOW and WHERE to put the effort!

I was having unfinished work from last week of not having the results I wanted from the test bench. The acknowledge signal of Wishbone does not behave as what was expected. I edited the design code but it still did not work correctly. I asked Dr. Shawn about this and he said it was not about the design code but my test bench was written wrong. I still could not get it right after Dr. Shawn told me what to Read more

By [email protected], ago

Week 3

It’s already week 3. Time flies on internship. Its really not boring either. I sometimes spend +8 hours in the office but I’m never thinking “Oh man when can I leave?” Instead its “shit I’ve been here for 10 hours I should probably leave”. This week’s work was a continuation of last weeks’. First I wanted to make my tests better by not using “no operation for loops” as delays. It would take a different amount of time on every board even when they were all programmed Read more

By [email protected], ago

Characterizing The Boards

This was my second week here. I was tasked with troubleshooting and characterizing the boards. There are in total seven prototypes for me to play with. The boards are divided into old and new boards. The main differences are that the new boards use slightly different PIC32 and Spartan-6 chips. And the LAN chip on the new boards is driven by a different clock source than on the old ones. Now some of these boards have issues. Some of them Read more

By [email protected], ago

The Light That Lights My World

On Monday, I was almost done with the design code for my first module, a 7 colour auto flash LED. I chose this module to start with as it is quite simple to program (only outputs), in the hopes that I can finish it quick.  However, what seem simplest is still quite hard for me as my skills in interpreting schematic to be turned into codes are still weak. I definitely will not be able to design it without the Read more

By [email protected], ago