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

Which are correct files for 5A-75E v8 board ?

With thanks to cncwhacko I finally got the board working. The problem had two layers:

• Windows was incorrectly configured for directly talking to the card on the given IP-address. I had to assign the PC an IP-address in the same subnet manually under the IPv4 settings. I.e. when the card has 192.168.1.20 as an address, the PC should get something in the range of 192.128.1.### with a subnet of 255.255.255.0 (or /8). After this change, the .svf-file as supplied by cncwhacko worked.
• Part deux: my own Hello world version still didn't work. This was I think due to the flag with_hw_init_reset=False which was not set.

@vre: you can use the v6.0 revision files for the v8.0 board; it has the same pinout. The mistake indentified by cncwhacko has been resolved in the latest version of litex-boards.

Great to hear you got it responding on the network!

I tried pulling in your package with VS Code and created the docker envs from within, still dont know how to access the actual linuxcnc container, do you have a run through of how to do that?

I also played with ice studio a little bit to see what your current stepper verilog looks like. Currently shows a syntax error in the very last block but it doesnt look like one as far as I can tell. Did you source that from somewhere else?

First a quick check question: did you install the Remote containers plugin in VSCode? With this plugin you can easily start the container and use the VS Code terminal to interact with the container. For more information see the   documentation  .

I have improved the container (available on GitLab). I've put oss-cad-suite and LinuxCNC on the path.:

• Building firmare:
  • cd to the root (workspace);
  • type python3 -m firmware <config-file>
  • the output will be placed in a folder with the name of the config-file, cd to this folder and then to gateware, i.e. /workspace/<config-name>/gateware
  • in this folder run chmod +x build_<cardname>.sh followed by ./build_<cardname>.sh;
  • use your tool of choice to load the image to the card.
• Testing:
  • You can test the firmware and driver with halrun;
  • Start testing with the following command sequence:
    • loadrt litexcnc
    • loadrt litexcnc_eth config_file=<path_to_config_file>
    • loadrt threads name1=servo-thread period1=100000 fp1=1
    • addf <card_name>.0.read servo-thread
    • addf <card_name>.0.write servo-thread
    • show pin
    • show function
    • start

At this moment I'm still puzzling how to access the card from the container when the card is directly attached to the laptop. Because docker will generate its own network, it does not see the card, because it is outside the subnet. Happy testing!

I think something along the lines of "Discussion of Colorlight 5A-75E/5A-75B as FPGA controller board" would be more descriptive.

thank you! I was able to get the dev env working locally, this will be handy for testing thing out.

i found a few typos in your testing notes:
```
loadrt litexcnc_etch config_file=<path_to_config_file>
```
should be
```
loadrt litexcnc_eth config_file=<path_to_config_file>
```

and then:
```
loadrt threads name1=servo-thread period=100000 fp=1
```
should be
```
loadrt threads name1=servo-thread period1=100000 fp1=1
```

would <board_name> in my case be something like, `colorlight_5a_75e` ? its not super clear where thats defined.

I typed those commands as I remembered, my apologies for the typos. For clarity, I updated the typos in the original post.

Regarding the <board-name>, this is defined in the JSON file with the tag "name". However, I discovered that it is hard-coded to 'test' at this moment. Tonight I will update this to use the correct name. In halcmd it is quiet easy to retrieve the board name, after adding the board with You can retrieve the functions withThis tells you which functions can be added to the thread and you could derive the board-name from this output.

awesome, thank you! I see the section where test name is hardcoded--I am new to C so am dangerous at this point ;-D, but was able to see it connect to the board over my network from the container.

I am going to attempt to replace a few of the buffers and test inputs/outputs on the board. Just purchased a hot air rework station so that will be another fun thing to try out.