Nexys by Digilen xbd file

Haven't done anything with the EDK, but so far I've found very little indication that many people have bought the board at all. Suprising as it's an interesting one... perhaps because it's an independent digilent product and not one made for Xilinx?

cs,

Heck, we (APD FPGA Lab) have purchased Digilent boards for use here at Xilinx in the past! A lot cheaper than fiddling with making something ourselves.

Once a board exists from a vendor, no reason to re-invent the wheel.

I bought a Digilent Spartan 3E board personally to teach a class, using class materials from San Jose University, and my co-worker Eric Crabill.

I am so very pleased that there are enough students using Xilinx chips that Digilent can make a successful business out of making and selling the boards.

The concept is simple: buy one board, and it lasts through a number of EE and CS courses (introduction to logic, HDL programming, machine architectures, embedded systems, IO/Memory/Interfacing, etc...). The cost is less than one engineering textbook, the student owns it (so they take care of it), and it is useful even after they graduate.

That and the ubiquitous student laptop pc, and they are "in business."

Austin

Glad to hear a logic company is open to the logical solution.

My comment though was more that for a relatively interesting and extremely inexpensive board, Nexys seems to have a very small user base. Search this newsgroup on it, and there's only a very few threads - wheras there are many mentions of the S3 kit, S3E, etc boards. I was speculating that perhaps the difference there was that those are Digilent boards which Xilinx promotes, wheras Nexys is Digilent operating only on its own.

The practical impact of this is that while a user can benefit a lot from others work on the more popular boards - downloaded project skeletons, solutions, and general advice, for the less popular boards they are on their own... or nominated to blaze the trail.

: My comment though was more that for a relatively interesting and : extremely inexpensive board, Nexys seems to have a very small user : base. Search this newsgroup on it, and there's only a very few : threads - wheras there are many mentions of the S3 kit, S3E, etc : boards. I was speculating that perhaps the difference there was that : those are Digilent boards which Xilinx promotes, wheras Nexys is : Digilent operating only on its own.

The Nexys has to be about my favourite board - compact, dirt cheap (even with the S3-1000 part), the same pinout FX2 header as their other boards (with 6 extra IOs even) and the key point for me is the Cypres EZ-USB device on the board has all the key pins conencted to produce your own USB interface using the FPGA and the Cypress part.

Other boards from Digilent are now using the Xilinx USB cable firmware, redacting the schematics and (presumably) not connecting the main data ports, which is a shame as having a decent on-board USB2 interface is a major time/hastle saver for me. (Thinly disguised whinge about their S3E starter board... :-)

Cheers cds

Yes... in theory. But have you gotten it working yet?

It's not a problem with the board, it's just that getting the fx2 all ready to go is a non-trivial exercise, and most existing open source projects for it do some wierd things, require oddbal build environments rather than simply the SDCC complier on its own, want to do the host side in python, etc... What happened to good old C and Makefiles?

I did manage to get the FPGA programmed through the USB using some modified open source programming tools, but then had to put it back on the shelf to work on other things before I could get the data flowing. Would be great if there were a simple, open, framework for doing USB data communication (firmware stub + fpga code stub + libusb host code)

: > The Nexys has to be about my favourite board - compact, dirt cheap (even : > with the S3-1000 part), the same pinout FX2 header as their other boards : > (with 6 extra IOs even) and the key point for me is the Cypres EZ-USB : > device on the board has all the key pins conencted to produce your own : > USB interface using the FPGA and the Cypress part.

: Yes... in theory. But have you gotten it working yet?

Yup. Mind you I'm only using it for a high speed data interface and not trying to get the JTAG working - from my viewpoint the board has a perfectly good JTAG header on it and Digilent do cheap and functional USB2 JTAG cables...

: It's not a problem with the board, it's just that getting the fx2 all : ready to go is a non-trivial exercise, and most existing open source : projects for it do some wierd things, require oddbal build : environments rather than simply the SDCC complier on its own, want to : do the host side in python, etc... What happened to good old C and : Makefiles?

I looked at using open source code and SDCC, but couldn't face it. Why make life complicated...

Cypress provide some decent example projects for use with the Keil tools, and a download of a limited version of uVision / C51 etc. with commercial and code size restrictions. Using those tools you can get things running quite rapidly by modifying the example projects. The EZ-USB device isn't the simplest thing in the world though. I'd not be comfortable distributing any code built with SDCC as everyone seems to use the fx2regs.h file written and (C) by Keil. (Nothing to stop someone producing their own from the monumental tech. ref manual)

: I did manage to get the FPGA programmed through the USB using some : modified open source programming tools, but then had to put it back on : the shelf to work on other things before I could get the data : flowing. Would be great if there were a simple, open, framework for : doing USB data communication (firmware stub + fpga code stub + libusb : host code)

Again I used their CyUsb windows driver as there was then example code to work from. Even if you want to end up with a FOSS stack it's worth starting with the Keil tools and CyUsb / MSVC as otherwise there are to many unknowns and pitfalls.

Steve,

Thank you for posting that. Could you perhaps provide a little explanation as to what is there? In particular, while I see some fx2 code and host code, and can't seem to figure out the relation between that and the mmc card stuff. Is there an fx2 interface state machine or anything like that in the verilog that I'm overlooking? Also, were you running the fifo's on the fx2, or did you have the 8051 core playing middleman?

I think you left the xst/ directory out of the tar file.

mmc-20070531/ mmc-20070531/demoboard/ mmc-20070531/demoboard/api/ mmc-20070531/demoboard/firmware/ mmc-20070531/demoboard/packages/ mmc-20070531/sim/ mmc-20070531/wb_mmc/

My issue is not with getting the computer talking to the fx2 chip - I can already do that (can jtag program an FPGA with it).

The issue is finding a generic example for using the fx2 fifos to interface with an FPGA. Most the projects I'm aware of that implement this also implement a lot of extraneous stuff which makes it very hard to tell what exactly they are doing. Thus I'm back to sorting it out from scratch.

I guess, 13 answers later you still didn't get the .xbd file, right ?

Indeed it's proving very hard to track down, i even asked someone on the inside at xilinx and digilent if they had one and still came up blank.

ask again the support at digilent. They sent me the files yesterday.