A Few Words About Your Final Project

Looking forward to seeing the projects!

As a reader, I sometimes find it hard to follow blogs (not specifically design challenge ones, just any blog in general), because sometimes people launch into stuff without mentioning what they are working on! To the participants, if you don't mind, please give a simple plain-language explanation about the board and the SoC device, and what the project is about. Not everyone will have followed all your posts, and not everyone knows what each board does.

Also, without spell and grammar check, it's hard to follow long blogs.

Sections help too.. please organize the blog, so that the readers don't get lost in the detail without knowing what goes where. It would be awesome to see separate titles at least for any high level design, for software, for HDL, for circuits, for testing, for results and summary and so on. This is easy for the writer with some editing/rearrangement, but very hard for the reader, if the writer forgets to do it.

Screenshots from large screens can have a ton of detail, so often I don't know what particular thing the writer wishes to focus my attention on. Some detail in the text, or a simple arrow can help there.  Not all of us will have used the same development tools, so we don't know which bit of a screenshot to look at.

I hope people use the editor tools, GitHub and so on, for code sharing. It is tiring going through an extremely long blog where half of it is pages of code that have not been formatted.

Also, reading about the benefits and usefulness of stuff is interesting. The project may be very niche (e.g. detecting when watercress is growing) but if you highlight how universal the techniques are and the benefits in other more typical use-cases, then people can relate to the project and learn more from it. For instance, that project may involve color detection and machine learning, so if it was made clear in the intruduction that the project covers color detection and machine learning and that the concepts will directly apply to other use-cases such as warning light detection from machines, or remote fire and smoke detection or whatever, then it helps the reader brainstorm a bit further too.

For instance, (not really a blog, it was a online meeting) the other day I attended a JavaScript talk, and it could have been boring but it wasn't, and after it finished, I worked for several hours into the night, just motivated from the talk, to try to improve some simple project I was working on, based on what I'd learned. It's nice if blogs can provide that feeling too.

Also, from my perspective, personally it is not interesting if a huge chunk of the blog is spent showing how to install stuff, since the reader came to read about a project, not a tutorial. If it were me, I'd probably replace all that with (say) "the process to install the system is quite involved, and the steps I took are all detailed here: xyz". That way, everyone is still helped by seeing what steps you took when they too try to repeat what you did, but at the same time the blog is kept interesting to read and still learn from. If it's a tutorial that would be a different matter of course, you'd be more likely to show individual steps then.

I like reading blogs which make me want to get up and learn more, or go install Vivado etc and start experimenting. 

Also, readers can spot filler material and AI-generated stuff. Reviewers will happily spend hours scrutinizing blogs so they will spot it too. Also, blogs can lose appeal when the code or schematics are not made available.

Thanks Shabaz, a lot of common sense in your comment.

The Path to Programmable program III is especially long and complex. The training part has involved a considerable effort on the part of all the participants since there are three consecutive courses without any type of tutoring or mentoring. At some point I have felt totally lost following an outdated guide or dealing with a problem with the tools.

I think we've all gotten to this point pretty tired. That's why I think messages like yours are very important, they help us focus on what's important.

Thanks for the reminder and for keeping us on the track.

Thanks rscasny for clarifying on Final Project.

Thanks Shabaz , good tips 

The training materials are great and very helpful. I am glad that we learned Avnet TTC as a group since almost 50% tool chain got updated, however, the training material has not been updated accordingly. Build a decent project on either FPGA platform will be a challenge for every participant here. Thanks for reminding us with such design paths. I will stick with my original plan to get the design done on time.

rscasny , do we have to tag or title the blog of the final project in any particular way to facilitate its search and classification?

You can always decide on a custom tag to apply to your content and let the team know about it.