Thoughts on improving hardware awareness in PNC

Is there away to let PNCconf know which sserial channels are used internally by the daughter board?

Right now I hard code looking for firmware names and do some magic so the user doesn't have to configure the internal channels.
Means I have to add each new combination or else the user must select them himself.

I think this would work, as info in the daughter board hint, as long as the firmware gives per-connector hints ( so it knows which daughter board goes where).

So the firmware tells what daughter board goes where and the daughter board hint text tells me which sserial is for internal board stuff and which is available to the user.

Chris M

Probably the daughterboard hint XML file would have these things
something like:

<pin>
<pinfunction>sserialtx0</pinfunction>
<direction>out</direction>
<local>yes</local>
<localfunction>Field I/O</localfunction)
</pin>


or for a g540 config for example

<pin>
<pinfunction>Step</pinfunction>
<direction>out</direction>
<local>yes</local>
<localfunction>ChargePump</localfunction)
</pin>


Note that the daughtercard hints should work without any firmware changes as long as the user specifies what daughtercard is connected to what I/O connector (or this info could be added to the configuration XML file in the interim)

I prefer that the user doesn't have to pick the right daughter board for the right connector when possible.
users are notorious for picking the wrong card or wrong connector (which is understandable when first starting)

Anything that can help PNCconf auto select the things that make sense to do so, would help usability.

Chris M

The user will have to in many cases since the hint is by nature fairly generic, that is a SVST4_8 config can be connected to several different daughtercards

I was thinking it would be nice if there was a text description for the firmware somehow.
The naming convention leaves people with no idea what the differences are.

It would be nice if they pull up a description of the intended use.
Obviously the daugther board hint helps a lot and I can will add that to PNCconf when we have some samples.

ya maybe the daughter board hint is enough..
between the usable daughter cards and the available components, I think that may be enough.
I've gotten feedback about firmware choices being overwhelming, but being able to match a daughter card to a firmware would narrow things a lot.
kinda thinking out loud here I guess.

Its really a factoring problem

Each FPGA configuration (or maybe just XML file for now) has a daughterboard hint per connector. Note that the hint is not very specific for example the "7I30" hint works with 7I29, 7I30, 7I33, 7I40 (and of course 7I42A in any mode and 7I37 with just GPIO) The 7I30, 7I40 and 7I29 daughteboard info files are almost the same but may have global settings (PWM etc ) that differ. Heres where you need to query the user as to whats attached to each connector.

each daughtercard has a (XML?) file that describes each pin and global hints