Riocore setup from scratch for dummies

Hi everybody, as the name suggests this is a guide for people wanting to install and start playing around with Riocore.
For those that don't know anything about Riocore you can read through the original thread :

www.forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/49142...d-on-fpga-ice40-ecp5

This guide is aimed at people that aren't linux guru's, that want to have a try at this awesome LinuxCNC software/hardware and that might struggle like I did...for weeks...to install it and get it going.

Credit to meister, the guy behind it all, he has done an impressive job of getting all this going.

Another credit to ColdTurkey, his idea of using the LinuxCNC live install to setup software/hardware in the Remora thread is what I based my approach on, this way everybody has the closest starting point possible.

This guide will focus on getting everything going for the Gowin Tang Nano FPGA, and meister's Tangoboard, once you have this going you can select other FPGA's and boards as you wish. You will most likely need to change the FPGA programming side of things with other FPGA's.

OK lets begin...
This is for a normal PC, I will have a look at a Raspberry Pi install sooner or later hopefully.
Download and install the latest live install of Linuxcnc, then open a terminal

sudo apt install git
open firefox, skip all start steps, start browsing, google search gowin eda
open page, (first link for me) create account, only email and password required
once logged in, select support, then Gowin EDA Home, then Download Gowin EDA
select software for Linux tab
select the one that says education, (click over to the right)
  (at the time of writing this it is the 7th option down)
open File system, navigate to Downloads, right click and select extract to
click on the little folder icon and select Home then extract
go to the folder in file system, right click rename folder to gowin
    its easier to type out later
open terminal, enter these one at a time :  
git clone github.com/multigcs/riocore.git
sudo apt install python3-pip
sudo apt install python3-yaml
sudo apt install python3-graphviz
sudo apt install openfpgaloader
sudo apt install python3-pyqtgraph

That last one takes a while to install

Now we setup the USB programming :
in terminal still,
cd gowin/Programmer/bin
once you are in that folder type and enter :
sudo ./Gowin_USB_Cable_Installer.sh
sudo make

reboot machine

open terminal

type and enter :
export PATH=$PATH:home/your_user_name/gowin/IDE/bin

in my case my user account is "me" so I type:

export PATH=$PATH:/home/me/gowin/IDE/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/home/me/riocore/bin

change to the riocore directory
cd riocore

now type
PYTHONPATH=. bin/rio-setup riocore/configs/Tangoboard/config.json

This should get you up and running, now there is lots to learn about setting up a machine but hopefully this will take the heartache out of starting.

Now things can be a little weird, I believe the Tang Nano needs to be plugged in at reboot, sometimes it won't flash properly, I cannot honestly say I have got it 100% sorted but if anybody finds a better solution we can edit this to suit.

Good luck
Russell.

Hi
Oliver has made some .deb packages, presumably, to setup the reqiured tool chains and packages. Any instructions on usage for us dummies and does the package take away some of the steps defined above?

I would prefer the route described above,
it's easier to always be up to date via git.

The most complicated part of the installation is the toolchain, which has to be installed manually. Everything else is just copy paste

meister wrote:

I would prefer the route described above,
it's easier to always be up to date via git.

The most complicated part of the installation is the toolchain, which has to be installed manually. Everything else is just copy paste

Agreed just a pull and there you go.  Thanks.

the quick gowin install way without login