icestudio
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FPGAwars
Add support for the Orange Crab
I've backed this board, the Orange Crab, based on the ECP5-25F, which would benefit greatly from Icestudio support. It features a Feather-compatible pinout, 1 Gbit of DRAM and a built-in ADC. It has even successfully booted Linux out of a Litex SoC RISC-V core.
As the ULX3S board became supported by Icestudio (based on the ECP-5), the base support for the toolchain should be there, so there is no need to start from scratch.
The first step is to support it in Apio. Icestudio just call apio for performing the synthesis. I've opened this issue in apio
I've commited and initial support for the board. The .pcf file is missing. @jmi2k do you know if this file is available or should we wait for it?
ok, I've found a very simple .pcf file here: https://github.com/gregdavill/OrangeCrab-examples/tree/master/verilog/blink It is not complete, just the clk and three leds but i can use it for the initial testings
I've been able to synthesize this hello world example ok, but I cannot test on a real board (because I do not have an orangecrab board)
It would be great if you could test it (@jmi2k) . You have to use icestudio from the develop branch
I don't have the board yet, I'm still awaiting for my group buy unit to come. Let's see if someone with a prototype can provide some help.
I've updated the pinout.pcf following this as reference, but I don't know how to generate the pinout.json (or even if it's required!). Can you help me?
Yes! Great! could you emit a pull-req with the .pcf file? For generating the pinout.json there a script in the app/resources/boards/ called generator.py for converting from .pcf to .json... but I am not sure if it work with the new .pcf sintax (used by nextpnr). I have to try it and modify the script accordingly
ECP5 does not use PCF files at all, it uses LPF files (whether with nextpnr or with Diamond).
I've uploaded the PR, with the file extension changed to .lpf. I've followed the ULX3S pinout as reference, so the syntax should be right.
Gave this a spin. It's not working exactly right. I can compile an example project, but loading it fails.
The main issue is that my PC's has an internal dfu device. So I get an error at the programmer saying that I need to specify a device.
dfu-util 0.9
Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc.
Copyright 2010-2016 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt
This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/
dfu-util: Invalid DFU suffix signature
dfu-util: A valid DFU suffix will be required in a future dfu-util release!!!
dfu-util: More than one DFU capable USB device found! Try `--list' and specify the serial number or disconnect all but one device
This can be done in the following ways: either add the device VID/PID pair to the dfu-util
dfu-util -d 1209:5af0 -D bitstream.bit
Or in the bitstream add a dfu-suffix
dfu-suffix -v 1209 -p 5af0 -a bitstream.bit
dfu-util -D bitstream.bit
The programmer is also currently using sudo dfu-util. It's probably better to add a udev rule to enable user access, instead of requiring sudo.
Gave this a spin. It's not working exactly right. I can compile an example project, but loading it fails
That should be solved in apio (which is the backend). Icestudio uses apio for building and uploading
I will re-open the issue in apio
I've generted the pinout.json file. Now the pins are accessible from Icestudio. The bitstream generation is working fine
