PCB and most components arrived, the PCB had been built and some basic testing had been done.
SVNES
SystemVerilog implementation of the NES hardware.
Using Altera DE0 Nano FPGA board, features Cyclone IV EP4CE22F17C6N FPGA (22,320 LEs, 594 kb) On-board 32MB SDRAM AT070TN92 800x480 24-bit TFT display
A complete reimplementation of previously unfinished version: Ref: 86ce2d5c7c7bdbaeb6bb298edfd711bb95508241
Nosumor remake
Got a refund on shipping fees, iteration 2 of the PCB was therefore sent for manufacturing, before the first prototype arrived.
Added pull-up resistors on audio I2C bus and MMC, changed keycap lighting to 2 RGB LEDs back mounted. However, the RGB LEDs on the bottom side of the PCB can no longer be individually controlled, and the keycap RGB LEDs can only have the same colour, due to lacking of GPIO pins and spaces.
Vixen project
This week(?) is all about performance optimisations, not much to demonstrate, therefore the project meeting was cancelled.
Now, the application can run on Raspberry Pi 1 with the TCP controller at full speed (50 fps) most of the time, with a CPU usage of 10% to 100% (mostly ~40%). That performance now is actually also depends on the efficiency of controller implementations quite a lot, relative to the optimised playback engine.
Nosumor remake
Nosumor keyboard remake project, started on 07/Jun/2017, now finalised first prototype PCB design and started prototype production. The PCB layout was made compatible with the original Nosumor v3 front panel. (PCB manufacturer: Seeed Studio)
Features: 50x50 (mm) board area 2 mechanical keyboard switches and 3 buttons Keycap lighting (white) and 2 other independent RGB LEDs 3.5mm audio jack with TLV320AIC3110 audio codec STM32F722RE Cortex-M7 high performance MCU USB 2.0 high-speed PHY USB3370 On-board FT2232D connected to UART & JTAG Extension UART with 3.3V output
Vixen project
Implemented VixenConsole command line interface application for direct playback. Ref: 12f190bfdbe81205838e808cb86fa7f3a8f2039f
It uses slightly modified Vixen.dll from the original codebase for module loading and execution pipeline.
C# load Type from DLLs in another directory
To search DLLs in another directory for
Type.GetType()
e.g. (From Modules/Controller/TCPLinky.dll loaded using Assembly.LoadFrom)
Type.GetType(“VixenModules.Output.TCPLinky.TCPLinkyData, TCPLinky”)
Add following to app.config:
Ref: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/.../load-contexts-and-type-gettype/
Vixen project
All spring term exams finished.
Demonstrated VixenLinky on 4 different platforms: Linux NAS server Raspberry Pi 3 Noah NP1380