Engineering Elegance

Communication Protocols

This week I continued to study further on the topic of Wishbone signals and also communication protocols. I tried creating testbenches for available codes that had been designed to observe the waveform output but failed to compile it because there were errors. Dr. Shawn pointed out that it was due to my lack of understanding on the communication protocols thus I was not able to make the codes correctly or verifying the resultant waveform. Therefore, I had to study the Read more

By [email protected], ago

Preparing for Deployment

It was about time that I finally dealt with all of the bugs (took me long enough) and it’s a good thing that I did, considering how silly and simple the solution for most of them was. I got the feeling that a bunch of them will emerge though once the entire project gets deployed for the client to use, which is on Tuesday, but that’s for the upcoming week, along with all the updates and changes which will need Read more

By [email protected], ago

Second Week of Internship

This week I was assigned a few tasks by Dr. Shawn. The first one is to familiarize myself with tools such as Emacs and GTKwave. Emacs is a handy text editor which are extensible and can also be customized. Meanwhile, GTKwave is a tool for viewing and analyzing waves. I used both these tools for my Verilog design programs and testbenches. At first, I was quite slow to get myself used to the basic and movement commands in Emacs but Read more

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HOTP and cURL

This week I worked on the HMAC-based one-time password (HOTP) key which is used to encrypt the message. The encryption is achieved using a key and a counter. The HOTP code is based on a work done by one of the previous interns. As Dr. Shawn pointed out, the main problem with HOTP is that it needs to store the key and the counter on the flash memory which will reduce the life expectancy of the memory. The alternative method Read more

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Final Touches

With Monday and Wednesday being public holidays, one could say that this was a pretty short week. Continuing with the tasks from last week, I had most of the work done on Tuesday and Thursday, setting up new pages, enhancing already implemented features, such as the “date picker” and “auto suggest” through the use of JQuery. That leaves me with one more page which I need to set up, along with the bug fixes. I will also have to thoroughly Read more

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Second Meeting

Started off this week trying to finish off my work from the previous one, whereas I was making some progress, it wasn’t fast enough and I couldn’t see myself being capable of finishing things off before the deadline, that being, the client meeting. I had managed to set up the search functionality eventually while at home through the use of a CakePHP plugin, but once I had checked in the morning, I saw that Dr. Shawn had already implemented it Read more

By [email protected], ago

PCB Fiducial Markings

This week I tried solving the problem I was facing with putting the FPGA in configuration mode, which I have also explained in my blog last week. The main issue is that after TCPIP_STACK from Harmony Configurator is initialised, pin D0 will not be configurable anymore. I have tried reading the peripheral selection register for pin D0 (RPD0R), it reads 0000. According to the data sheet, 0000 corresponds to  “No Connect”, which means the pin is used as a normal Read more

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Second Day of Internship at Aeste

I finished going through all the tutorials of Git. It was very useful for understanding Git, how it works and the methods of using it were clearly demonstrated. Besides that, Dr. Shawn taught me on law today while relating it to the project that I will be assigned on. Among it were on intellectual properties (IP), patents, copyrights and trademarks. In conclusion, it is crucial to ensure that our work are made right and permitted by law.

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First Day of Internship at Aeste

I was not at peace and was scared to start my internship here as I did not finish my work to study all the pre-internship materials that was given to me by Dr. Shawn. Dr. Shawn was very furious to know but I was fortunate that he is still giving me the chance to cover up everything by this week. However, I have to manage my time efficiently as I also had new tasks given on Git. Git is an Read more

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Week 6

Continuing with the list of issues from the previous week, my progress eventually came to a halt, things such as the implementation of an audit log, which is used to record any changes made within a database table, such as deletion or modification, are hindering my progress. Even though there is a CakePHP plugin which is specifically made for that purpose, I am still facing trouble installing and getting the plugin up and running. With such a really slow progress Read more

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