Just gone 3pm here in Sydney.
No something interesting.
I worked on a little project using an FPGA dev board to run MESA's hostmot2 firmware. First attempt was based on the 7c81 using either SPI (raspberry pi) or EPP (best on motherboard based parallel ports). The issue with the board I used is that the EEPROM need to be changed and the headers were already soldered on.
That same hardware can also be used with the LinuxcncRIO project.
Another project I had a go at was modding the 7i90 Smart serial firmware to support 4 encoders to run on a dev board.
For my latest I've grabbed a different dev board (eeprom is correct size & bought with the headers unslodered, but this time I'll be trying a Ethernet interface, chip is same as use on the Mesa products, so no having to rewrite a driver, which requires a couple of steps, first being working out the instructions of the softcore, working how the driver talks to the chip and then how it integrates with the rest.
Some pics, 2x17 ports from breakout boards (mesa 25 pin daughter boards can be used as well) and 4 extra pins for 2 smart serial ports or extra I\O.
First off is the FPGA from aliexpress:
The Ethernet board, this is experiment only, the FPGA board sits on top, disregard the type of 2x25 headers they can be changed to suit. Should have the boards in a couple of weeks.
One of the daughter boards from the orignal project.
