Today I began with the work on the electronics, since a basic ultrasonic transmission worked out yesterday. I started with populating an ATmega328 and a 24FC512 (I went for the FC type because that gives me the possibility to later run the digital part of the design at 1.8V to significantly reduce its power consumption while it is in idle mode).

I successfully uploaded an Arduino bootloader to the ATmega328 and was able to reuse the code I wrote for the eeprom programmer earlier, I just had to do some minor changes to handle the 16-bit address range, required by the 512kBits of memory.

I also coded some python scripts that handle automatic upload of FPGA bitstreams to the eeprom.