This week I continued my attempt to establish a connection with the SD card. The first thing I did was to check the connection in the existing, and I found one of the pins was connected incorrectly, which is SDI2. The only option I found was to route it to pin 42, which is currently connected to location T3 of the FPGA. Also, pin RD10 acts as a switch which determines if a micro SD card has been physically connected, when Read more
After successfully integrating the FPGA code with ethernet and USB serial, I proceeded to create a test firmware to establish and verify a connection with a micro SD card. The first thing to note about this project is that the SD card is connected to the PIC32 through the FPGA, so the FPGA needs to be configured correctly before the SD card will work. I started by adapting the existing code from the FPGA project. The functions that I used Read more
There is one piece of the puzzle that is needed to deploy our new product, that is a wildcard DNS. I had assumed that we would need to roll our own DNS server to achieve this but lo and behold, there are existing wildcard services e.g. XIP.IO that is used by RedHat for OpenShift! However, as we will need to run this over HTTPS, we would need to create a wildcard certificate and since we do not own the xip.io Read more
The FPGA project has been succesfully integrated into the current project containing the usbcdc and ethernet. Now the test firmware has working ethernet, usb serial port, and also successfully configures the FPGA. My attempt at integrating the FPGA project with the other two did not work initially, with the result being all the digital pins being pulled high instead of toggling as in a ring counter, even after making sure that the pins are all configured correctly. I therefore started to Read more
This week I started by trying to modify the FPGA code so that it would transfer in chunks of data rather than all in one go. Turns out a lot of the codes are not needed so Dr Shawn rewrote everything into less than 10 lines, this time using the Static SPI driver instead of Dynamic. The code now transmits the bitstream byte by byte. Next I experimented with the usbcdc com port project in order to output a string Read more
The FPGA is now configurable using the pic32mz. The cause of the problem was identified as being the clock to the FPGA not being set, and also the ucf file declared an unconnected pin, J13 as the clock pin. The problem was solved by enabling REFCLKOx in the Harmony Configurator, System Services->Clock->Use Clock System Seervice?->Clock Configurator Settings->Enable Reference Clock x, and then routing the pic32mz pin to the actual clock pin on the FPGA, and changing the declaration of the location Read more
Started the week by checking some of the keyboard code to find out what is wrong. I found that the device driver for the keyboard seem to be working ok, just the key sending part. The code seems to be for a keyboard with a 6 key rollover, which lets the keyboard send multiple keys at one go. I removed some part of the rollover code and as expected, it won’t send any keys, but the device driver works fine Read more
This week I restructured the code for the usb keyboard, the aim is to modify as little as possible from the original demo code, so that there is a clear separation of my code from the one provided by microchip in its demo code and also reduces the amount of code that is caused by modifying the code. I created separate functions that work alongside the original code, but uses a global variable to provide a bridge between my code and the state Read more
This week I proceeded to test the firmware created by the previous interns. The first thing I needed to do was replicate their result. One thing I realised from this is not to remove the board support package in the harmony configurator, as it turns out to be important in the tcp ip stack initialization. I first tried the pic32blink test, which for me does not actually blink but toggles the led that indicates that the driver is busy with a previous Read more
Started the week by continuing on with implementing a hid keyboard on the pic32. While doing this I encountered two major problems, one is that the keyboard refuses to output two of the same characters consecutively, the other problem was when I tried going through the character array starting from the 0th position, it starts from an arbitrary position instead (sometimes 5th, 6th, but mostly 11th to 13th position). For the problem that it doesn’t print out two same letters Read more