Ancestors

Written by TheZoq2 on 2024-11-22 at 16:30

Can you beat my record of 3 seaweed in janky floppy fish 🐠 ?

More seriously, I have spent a bunch of time recently updating https://play.spade-lang.org/ to support multiple presets, better input handling and a bunch more

I've also started updating the documentation, starting with a new tutorial that should hopefully make it easier to get started with the language https://docs.spade-lang.org/

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Written by TheZoq2 on 2024-11-22 at 16:37

One thing I'm extra excited about is the new blinky for software developers section in which I attempt to describe the way hardware works by how it can be "emulated" in software

If you're a software dev curious about #fpga and #asic I'd love to hear what you think of it!

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Written by Paul Young on 2024-12-26 at 06:22

@thezoq2 do you know how feasible it would be to use an Analogue Pocket to experiment with Spade?

I looked into the resources at https://www.analogue.co/developer/docs/getting-started a while ago and remember not having a great experience with the toolchain as a beginner.

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Written by TheZoq2 on 2024-12-26 at 20:12

@paulyoung Ohh, interesting question! Looks like that thing has an intel FPGA on it as the main thing. Sadly, that means you're forced to use the proprietary synthesis tool as far as I know. That can be hidden a bit with the Spade build tools as a plugin but that plugin would still have to be written.

Do you also need a bunch of libraries to interact with their hardware or how is that solved? Spade has pretty OK Verilog interop but you'd still have to write some stubs I think

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Written by Paul Young on 2024-12-26 at 23:43

@thezoq2 I’m not sure. I’ve had a couple of attempts at getting started with FPGA development and never gotten very far.

The last time I tried using Clash but ran into some pretty obvious bugs with it very early on so didn’t pursue it any further.

Spade looks promising so I was wondering if I could use the hardware I already have. Maybe I’ll try and make some progress with the simulator for now.

Out of curiously, which hardware or dev kit would be a good fit for Spade?

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Written by Paul Young on 2024-12-26 at 23:54

@thezoq2 the only other Analogue Pocket FPGA development I’ve seen was by @didier at https://codeberg.org/DidierMalenfant/openFPGA-tutorials/src/branch/main and that seemed to be using some custom tooling called pfTools

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Written by Didier Malenfant on 2024-12-27 at 00:15

@paulyoung @thezoq2 🙋🏻‍♂️ let me know if you have any questions or if I can help…

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Written by Paul Young on 2024-12-27 at 01:39

@didier thanks! Frans (@thezoq2) was asking in https://mastodon.social/@thezoq2/113720947031006726 if there are any libraries involved. You might be able to help answer that.

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Written by Didier Malenfant on 2024-12-27 at 01:55

@paulyoung @thezoq2 you do have to use Quartus to compile code and generate the core that programs the FPGA. You can either run Quartus natively on Windows or Linux or use Docker on macOS. My pf tools basically helps automate a lot of the steps required to build a core and interact with Quartus.

If you want to get started, I’d suggest trying one of my tutorials which should compile right out of the box and can confirm your toolchain is installed correctly.

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Written by Didier Malenfant on 2024-12-27 at 01:56

@paulyoung @thezoq2 not sure what you mean by librairies.

Here’s a introduction to pocket dev if you want to see how it works with a simple example https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ksJRnwwZwN0&list=PLIeKPs4E8E_Quvuffdx96OMxDrgEt6FuB&index=7&pp=gAQBiAQB

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Written by Paul Young on 2024-12-27 at 06:12

@didier @thezoq2 if I don’t want to use pf-dev-tools for now (trying to understand what it’s doing under the hood first) once I have something like display.sv from your tutorial, how do I get quartus_sh to compile it?

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Written by Didier Malenfant on 2024-12-27 at 15:04

@paulyoung @thezoq2 you’ll need a quartus project file. You can build one yourself but it’s not straightforward as you need to setup the PLLs and the correct chip target.

Why don’t you take one of my samples, build it using pf-dev-tools and the look for the project folder inside the _build directory and copy that to tinker with it directly in Quartus.

That will give you a leg up quickly and start from a known state.

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Toot

Written by Paul Young on 2024-12-27 at 18:29

@didier @thezoq2 I added SYSTEMVERILOG_FILE core/display.sv and set_global_assignment -name VERILOG_INPUT_VERSION SYSTEMVERILOG_2005 and it built.

I haven’t tried installing and running it yet. I forgot that I’d need a JTAG adapter.

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Descendants

Written by Didier Malenfant on 2024-12-27 at 19:38

@paulyoung @thezoq2 just be careful when editing Quartus project files directly.

You can install the core on an SD card without a JTAG adapter. There’s a bunch of config files needed too which is part of what pf-dev-tools takes care of but if you look at Analogue’s online docs you should be able to figure it out.

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