LinuxCNC-RIO - RealtimeIO for LinuxCNC based on FPGA (ICE40 / ECP5)

cornholio wrote:

I give up
 

Magic words!! I just did too, gotta call it quit bcuz I honestly can't make this medieval decade old crap working half-reliably whatever I try. Spent most of today learning this analconda python env, the whole things randomly puts up missing headers although all deps are in, ISE freezes, throws million warnings for no valid reasons, let alone unable to flash a bin over using openfpga among several others I've tried. Just nothing at all works - utter thrash all around in a few words. 20+hrs I'll never have back lool Honestly not recommending anyone to jump in the same bunny hole as I did, annihilates the awesomeness and rep of RIO entirely.

Nuff ghetto. Back to Gowin's EDA. Epic simplicity, less than gig dwload high-performance eda, 15mhz bin flasher/debugger, flawless under linux, ultimate 2-clicks-max joy at a reasonable price. STRONGLY ADVISED. 

@rthorntn
Don't. Don't do it man lol You've been warned. We'll figure out a way to get this board made avail somehow, no choice (in my case anyway).

thanks guys, you show me again that i'm on the right track

One of the reasons for RIO was the poor availability of mesa boards.

i will concentrate again on the ICE40 and epc5 in connection with yosys/nestpnr. There I have no stress with licences or availability.

with Kicat it works better and better (before i was very limited with eagle-cad), so i will probably build another board like the Tangoboard, but this time with ICE40 and with W5500 .

I might also pursue an old approach for a modular board,
I had already done some tests:






 

meister wrote:

thanks guys, you show me again that i'm on the right track

 

Yes. You are. Confirmed. 1000% spot on and a great visionary (imho).

If you don't mind/allow, let me know when you believe to have a semi-final stable solution of the Generator & Gui and I'll fork over. I'll bring in RIO for a "Gowin-Only Maintained Solution" and clean up the code of other toolchains, and everything else irrelevant to gowin. We can swap updates/features and ideas along. I'll point over to you for sources...  

ps. great way to publish that 5ax board sources and offloading from you any potential support/requests relating to that board/solution. 

i have finally moved the pll generators into the individual toolchain plugins, so that all toolchain-relevant parts are in the plugins.

this also makes it easier for you to remove everything that does not belong to gowin, you just have to remove all directories except thed gowin from riocore/generator/toolchains/.

Awesome. Thanks for that extra work and for doing that, appreciated. 

I'll fork this weekend. You're the best!

Those words were said cos I couldn't understand the point you were trying to make.

I don't get what issue you're having with ise.

Are you sourcing /opt/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/settings64.sh before doing anything.

Now what I'm going to say is coming from someone who has worked 95% of his life as either a builders' labourer or civil labourer (roadworks). I dropped out of school at 15 and the closest I've come to any trade qualifications is 3/4 of a carpentry apprenticeship.

I've installed ise 14.7 webpack on a fresh install of mint 21.3 a week or 2 ago on a laptop belonging to rthorntn.

Installed webpack and installed a licence on my bookworm Linuxcnc box this morning, and have been using it for an easy 12 months on my main machine, running Mint 21. This particular machine has been building the mesa firmware I run on my boards.
To say it's trash is utter BS, just cos you can't get it to work is not representative of the software. If you want help to get it setup convey your errors and I'll try to lend a hand, but it sounds like you just wanna put shit on it cos you can't get it working. That's a YOU issue not a ISE issue. I don't think you're a bad person, I just think you're wrong about the software.

openFPGALooader & Sprtan6 boards.
openFPGALoader works fine, tho you really need to read the docs to load the firmware into the SPI chip. It's a 2 stage process that loads a temp bitstream into sram then that config is used to write to the SPI chip (ollie's makefile doesnt address this and it wasn't what I'd call an issue ATM, I just modded the makefile). Ollie's makefile only loads into sram and you lose the config when you remove power.This needs to be done externally from the IDE.
I add this to the MakefileI wouldn't copy and paste that as make does like it's tabs in the right place. This is the bit,xc6slx9tqg144, that tells openfpgaloader to which temp bitstream to load.



For whatever reason openfpgaloader can be a bit flakey on reading the SPI id's and can be a PITA, I think the issue I was having in reading the SPI ID on a certain chip was that it may not have been either 100% error free or it was not genuine. Which kinda surprised me as I bought it from o Aussie guy off ebay. Another issue could be flakey du pont connections, yes we all know better.



I will admit getting the Xilinx DLC9LP USB programmer to work is a pain as is the parallel port programmer (which is a genuine Xilinx product).
The tools aren't rubbish, and just cos they are a few years old doesn't make them stop working.

I've also set rthorntn up with a Spartan6 dev board and a couple of daughter boards, but due to his choice of breakout board I had to design a buffer board as all the IO is via optos on his chosen breakout board.

In all honesty I think old mate is just spending a lot of money to he doesn't have to pay what it would cost to ship a Mesa board to Oz.
This is the second project I've given him assistance with.
Whilst I haven't tried the Gowin hardware route I've messed around with rio on a couple of ICE40 boards and several different Spartan6 boards.

In all honesty I think it would be a waste to give up on your design. I'm gunna guess you've put a good amount of hours routing the board. It would be silly to throw the towel in.

i have fixed the flash-command, thanks:
github.com/multigcs/riocore/commit/3c532...8bd8f24ff9f27349ae22

TangNano9K + W5500 to 2xBOB-IO

 

W5500
Level-Shifter (TXS0108E)
RGB-LED
Modbus
I2C - 5V (hope this will work via the level-shifter)

Maybe a good and cheap universal-board

github.com/multigcs/rio-tangbob