Weekly Summary

Week 1:

Reviewed the syllabus, created a project page on sites.google.com (here) with a link to a GitHub repository, and read over a little of the textbook.

Week 2:

Installed GTKWave and GHDL on my computer, began going over the basics of VHDL

Week 3:

Used GHDL and GTKWave to test hello world, the half adder, and expanded it to include the full adder as well.

Week 4:

Reviewed the Traffic Light video posted by another student, tried reproducing it with VHDL. It was a good introduction of a state machine in VHDL.

Week 6:

Installed XILINX, and started reviewing Lab 1

Week 7:

Found a group, began making plans for doing the labs.

Week 8.

Did Lab 1 with my group over zoom, we will work on the other labs later.

Week 9-10:

Completed further labs with my group over zoom, including more counters, pong and worked on the calculator. We decided on our final project, 'Flappy Duck' made like Flappy Bird.

Week 11:

Worked on Lab 6 with my group, I followed along until the bitstream generation process as before. See screenshot below:

We also began looking into how to work on VHDL on multiple computers, if it would be possible to test without a FPGA. I found this simulator, which I think might work to display VGA output form GHDL: VgaSim. (Contribution).

Weeks 12-13:

I worked with my group on the group project, investigating the VGAsim software. Ultimately, I think it is well worth looking into, but for the purposes of this project I think it would be more of a waste of time. I spent some time working on installing the software and looking through the documentation. I need more understanding of the VGA protocol; I tried writing some code in Python to emulate it but it ultimately didn't work. We finished the remaining labs, and I went back and started to work on the labs again by myself for documentation; they will be published in my GitHub and on the "Labs" page of my site.

I also looked at where FPGAs might have been used in mobile devices like phones, and found out that the iPhone 7 had an FPGA. This is really interesting to me, and I think that there are certainly applications and use cases where FPGAs would have a distinct advantage in phones, reprogrammed on the fly to suit whichever application happens to be running for improved speed and power usage.

Week 14:

We finished up the flappy duck project, based upon the bat n ball lab. Although, we are still working on trying to get sprites into the final product. I am working on finishing up my labs, I expect to have them all done by the date of the final.