ColorCNC Colorlight 5A-75E/5A-75B as FPGA controller board

Thanks for your reply!

When you run the chips on 3.3 volt, you have to keep the Vcc pin floating (not connected to the pad, as that will supply 5V) and connect it to 3.3V where it is available on the board?

Speaking of the 5A-75E V7.1:
There's 3.3v available at J33, (J33,J34) are the power & ground for jtag.


I'm sure if you probed around you could find other points.

Another point worth noting would be adding of a 100n cap for each 74LVC245.

I have bought 5A-75B and 5A-75E on Aliexpress.
I received today, both version 8.0.
The chipsets looks the same - Lattice LFE5U-25F 6BG256C and Realtek 8211FD.
What now?
Does anybody have firmware for this hardware?
Notice, the Chinese sellers in principle don't know what they sell, for example yesterday i received Altera JTAG however I bought Lattice JTAG...
You never know what you will get...
In my opinion, if the colorcnc are supposed  to be usefull, we must have few precompiled firmware for most popular versions of board...
I have got few photos, but bigger than permitted 1,6 MB.
I will share if somebody request.

• Looking at Litex-Boards 5A-75B v6.1, v7.0 & v8.0 are supported
• Looking at Litex-Boards 5A-75E v6.0 & v7.1 are supported.

There is some mention of the 5A-75E v8.0 mentioned here forum.linuxcnc.org/27-driver-boards/4442...rcnc?start=40#235439

The gateware is dependent on what boards are supported by the Litex code which is dependent on the reverse engineering the 5A-75B board it self.

As for myself I have a 5A-75E v7.1 and spent some time working out what signal goes to which buffer. Now that I have those buffers removed I am at the stage of waiting for delivery of parts to complete the conversion of getting inputs.

Using Xubuntu 21.04 (Litex installed) I have no idea why.

Hi tuxcnc, I'm working on 5A75B v8.0
It's building ok (just tweak the source for the correct board revision).
I'm now adapting the pinout for my needs an as I'll have chance I'll
try to enable and test the encoder inputs.

Did you try to build the default target in litex_boards directory?
to verify your installation.

Would be nice to be able to daisy-chain the boards.
That would simplify the in-out approach: just modify all the buffers
on a board to convert it to a input only board.
Then use one firmware for inputs only board (gpio, encoders ecc)
and one firmware for unmodded outputs only board, each with it's own ip address.
On this approach my problem is how to connect the second board on
phi 1 and make it connect to the host pc, anybody know how this would be
implemented in litex?