HW Checkpoint
HW
Setting up the new HW:
The Alhambra-II and the VGA connector, smaller wires.
Up until this point I was conecting my Alhambra-II FPGA directly with 20cm wires to the VGA conector and the ov7670 camera. This had two issues that needed to be addressed.
Our implementation for the sobel/color filters produce 2 bits of information per color component so I needed a 6bits VGA adapter to be able to correctly send the information to the VGA conector.
The length of the wires was causing too much noise which prevented me fron using a signal analyzer to debug the communications with the camera and also degraded all the data that the screen displayed. I replaced all the conections with the FPGA to use 10cm wires and removed unnecesary conections. The end result as a much cleaner solution.
GoPiGo
Set up the GoPiGo3 robot and tried its native applications, tested simple python commands on the webpage based interface.
Now I’m beginning to unravel the different layers that exist between the python code and the motors and actuators to identify the point where our FPGA will replace the raspberry pi, this seems to be the SPI interface that connects this Raspberry Pi to the GoPiGo board.