Again, this is a late post but I'm gonna keep documenting what we've done thus far. So, the first thing we did was survey all of the FPGA code to figure out how much space everything was taking up. See some pictures below for samples of the code base:

Based on compiler calculations:

1. Steering motor control code consumes 11.0% of slice registers and 15.1% of slice Lookup Tables (LUTs)
2. Read end stop code consumes 0.2% of slice registers and 0.4% slice LUTs
3. Throttle control code consumes 16.7% of slice registers and 24.7% of slice LUTs
4. EStop sensing code consumes 1.5% of slice registers and 2.6% of slice LUTs
5. LiDAR processing code consumes 29.6% of slice registers and 34.7% of slice LUTs
6. One copy of the tilt unit code consumes 18.5% of slice LUTs and 15.7% of slice LUTs

So that's what we have to work with. One of the main things we've noticed is that there's alot of poorly initialized code that was left by the previous teams. There is also quite a bit of mixing of data types (e.g. multiplying Int32 numbers by fixed-point numbers). So we'll be working to change those. Stay tuned!

So I realize this post is a little late but here it is! The research blog is back for the spring semester! I realize I was less than perfect with keeping the research blog updated but I'm planning to try really hard to keep this blog more up to date than I did last semester. 

Last semester, we ended with integration problems on the FPGA. The main problem was that the existing code on the FPGA was consuming most of the available FPGA resources, which meant that we did not have sufficient resources to integrate the motor controller code for both tilt units onto the FPGA. So, this semester, the goal is to:

1. Reduce resource usage on existing FPGA code to free up enough resources for the motor control code for both tilt units
2. Make the code more robust so that initialization and other errors are properly registered and logged
3. Properly document the entire code base so that future teams have a reference to work off of
4. Complete ROS integration to allow the forebrain in ROS to communicate to with the mid and hindbrain in labview
5. Complete teleop and click-to-waypoint functionality

We'll see how much we get done!