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
This week I started going through the sample codes and also the previous interns codes and tried to master them. It was hard at the beginning to understand the latest integrated project. However, once I studied the individual parts of the code separately it all started to make sense. In Read more
This week, I started my internship with Aeste. The week did not start well for me as I was not able to cover all the pre-internship material that was assigned to me by Dr. Shawn. After being scolded by him on the first day, I had an even bigger task Read more
By SD card working as stated in the title, I actually meant that it has only successfully established a connection to the SD card, and is far from being able to write to or read from the SD card. The connection is verified by sending a reset command to the SD Read more
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 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, 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 Read more