Start of what should be a good week.

So, as I alluded to on Saturday night, Friday I managed to get my firmware and software running on my FPGA, and got it to talk to my PC. A big issue was the communications interface between the FPGA board and my PC.

Communication is attained by writing text to a serial port on the FPGA board and then that signal is read into a PC using Hyperterminal. Here, the problem was two-fold. Firstly, we needed what is known as a null-modem adapter, a gadget which essentially takes the recieve and transmit pins on the connector and swaps them (so transmit on one device points to recieve on the other, and vice versa). The second was that one of my USB ports wasn't supplying enough power to the serial adapter in order for these signals to be read in (which was a real pain to debug considering I've been able to power things off it before). Anyways, it's done now, the hard part, that is. 

Right now, I'm just going to clean up the data acquisition software at which point I'm going to see if I can get the Ethernet running, a daunting task for sure, but at least now I've a proof-of-concept to work from.