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

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?

tuxcnc wrote:

Using Xubuntu 21.04 (Litex installed)

root@E555:/temp/colorcnc# ./colorlight_5a_75b.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/temp/colorcnc/./colorlight_5a_75b.py", line 15, in <module>
    from litex_boards.platforms import colorlight_5a_75b
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'litex_boards'


I have no idea why.

First of all running as root is a really bad idea.

Have you installed the Litex packages and the oss_cad_suite ?

ALittleOffTheRails wrote:

First of all running as root is a really bad idea.

Why ?
Many peoples tell me "it is bad idea", but nobody can tell why ...

tommylight wrote:

I am not good at explaining stuff, but in general, it is not a good idea to run as root although chances are very low that something will actually happen if you do not click and run unknown stuff/links/software/

Security is important in servers and multi-access systems.
When the computer is cut off from the network, even by a router, and has only one user, there is no other hazard than the stupidity of the user.
Logging in as a guest and writing sudo before each line will not increase security.
But this is OFFTOPIC and let's talk better how to compile firmware to Colorlite v8.0 ....

Litex supports at least V8.0 of the 5A-75B board.

The colorlight_5a_75b.py from romanetz (THANK YOU!) can also be used on a 5A-75B V8.0 board when you change near line 348

platform = colorlight_5a_75b.Platform()
to
platform = colorlight_5a_75b.Platform(revision="8.0")

This will change the pinout for ethernet etc. to V8.0

Colorcnc not yet working but I can connect to the board.