Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Battle on two fronts but still bashing away at memory controller on FPGA board

TWO FRONT WAR

In addition to the long term war trying to sort out how to get the memory interface system of the Vivado toolchain to successfully drive the DDR3 RAM on the Digilent Arty S7 board, I am fending off covid-19 virii.

Eleven days ago I got my latest booster shot plus the yearly influenza vaccine, but I didn't get it early enough. Monday both my wife and I began to feel upper respiratory congestion, which at first we ascribed to seasonal allergies, but by the evening it was clearly more than allergies. That had been our first thought since we both had the symptoms essentially simultaneously, which is typical of allergies.

Because the antiviral Tamiflu must be taken early in the illness to be effective, we decided to go to a clinic on Tuesday morning to get testing - expecting it was either a cold or the flu. The test swabs were jointly tested for flu and covid. We were floored to learn that we both tested positive for Covid. Evidently we were exposed at the same time, perhaps at a doctors visit she had the week prior for a checkup on her eye surgery. No way of knowing, of course.

There are antivirals for Covid, akin to Tamiflu. We were prescribed one and began taking it immediately. Hopefully we started it rather quickly in the course of the illness and it, plus the partially activated vaccinations we recently had, will lessen the severity and shorten the duration. 

This will keep me out of the shop (and cooped up in quarantine) for a few more days before I can venture out with masks on. 

MEMORY CONTROLLER BATTLES CONTINUE

I stripped down my logic to a bare minimum that will simply write and read from the memory interface based on pushbuttons on the fpga board. It will light up to show me that the write and reads were started and use color LEDs to tell me if the returned value matches what was written. 

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