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Week of 4/13 for Danny Mathieson

Goals for the Week:

  • Integrate the final automation calculation with writing to BRAM storage for output to a monitor through VGA
  • Begin working with multiple Pmod amplifiers
  • Presentation

Progress:

  • Calculation hardware is finished
  • Integrations has begun, but isn’t as far as we would like it to be at this point
    • We gave ourselves an extra week just in case we fell a little behind like this so we are not worried about the deadline
  • We have previous experience with the Pmod amplifiers, and have an idea on how we could use multiple amps at the same time
    • This would involve multiplexing the output between which amp we want to use and when
  • We have finished researching which automation rules have which properties, and once integration is complete we can see which rules provide interesting visual and audio effects

Current Challenges:

  • There are some bugs in integration between the final calculation and writing the final values to the BRAM
    • Not too worried here because we have dealt with similar problems before.  This just takes time
  • Calculation Speed
    • I thought that I would be able to increase the speed tremendously by working with hardware instead of my original software implementation, but it isn’t really that much faster.  I will continue to try to improve this once we have a working design
  • Playing multiple Pmod notes at the same time
    • This is the difficult challenge and will take most of my time in the coming week

Goals For Next Week:

  • Work out the bugs we are currently experiencing in integration
  • Work with multiple Pmod setup
  • Website – For expo
    • Post pages on interesting rule algorithms in cellular automation
    • Post design strategy page
    • Work on overall aesthetic design
  • (If Time) Improve calculation speed