RoadTest: XMOS xCORE-USB sliceKIT
Author: tayken
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?: Parallax propeller and FPGAs
What were the biggest problems encountered?: Examples were hard to follow. No simple example exists for this board.
Detailed Review:
I mostly work with microcontrollers and occasionally FPGAs. But not many of them have multiple cores except Parallax Propeller. I also tried using multiple Microblaze MCS softcores with my FPGA boards which were OK. I wanted to compare xCORE-USB multicore microcontroller to both of these systems: How easy is the language to use? Also how easy is the communication between cores? I also wanted to test out the software side: I mainly use Ubuntu for my development work and really like companies if they can supply an IDE that works on multiple operating systems. How easy is it to install IDE and drivers? For example JTAG programming cable driver installation is really problematic with Xilinx ISE. I also wanted to test out xSCOPE which couldn't happen due to complexity and time constraints, maybe I'll have time to look at them later.
In short this is an advanced development kit and if you don't know anything about XMOS products, this is not the one to start with. For beginners, StartKit is better as it has couple of LEDs and pin headers to connect to things as well as the PCIe connector for sliceCARDs.
The roadtest page and product page don't include everything in the box. Here is a better list and a picture:
This is all the parts of the box assembled together. As you can see the USB sliceCARD is different from the one at product page, but the one from the roadtest page. So this tells me that XMOS does not update their websites often. Also I believe this kit is not enough by itself, I believe GPIO sliceCARD should be added to this kit in order to test some of the example codes. I'll explain this in more detail. The PSU is a nice touch with multiple plugs, I really like it as the kits are sold all over the world an it's better to just connect the suitable plug then going to an electronics store to get an adapter or a PSU.
At first, the board looks really good! Switch and swap cards to test different peripherals and don't worry about wiring and cables. Well, actually you cannot worry about cabling as there are no pin headers soldered. No big problem, you can solder it yourself, right? Well think again as my board had these holes covered with solder so I just passed it. This led to me not being able to test some simple LED blink or connect a push button wherever I wanted. As there is no GPIO sliceCARD, I believe this is a big problem. Also the PCIe connectors seem to be badly soldered.
In this picture you can clearly see the solder filled header holes and badly soldered connectors. These are the only problems I saw with this board. The sliceCARDs are held in place by only this connector but it is a pretty tight fit. One worry may be connector life as these are not manufactured for multiple insertions.
Also Mixed Signal sliceCARD schematics were nowhere to be found on the product page or on the website. I had to search for it. You can get it here.
It's actually pretty easy to install the software under Linux, I was really amazed by it! You just download an archive file, extract a folder and you are done! Then run the "xtimecomposer" script under "XMOS/xTIMEcomposer/Community_14.0.0/" and the IDE loads up. One addition may be to have another script which installs a shortcut to your applications list.
Also installing drivers are real easy too: There is a folder named scripts with 3 files. You can use "check_xmos_devices.sh" for detecting if the devices are plugged in or not and if the drivers are installed. "setup_xmos_devices.sh" script moved the udev rules file to the appropriate directory and you have installed the drivers. Run the check script to test everything to be sure.
GUI looks real nice. There is a help section which talks about XC and how to write functions that run on different processors and how to pass messages between them. There is also an example section which contains all the application notes on the left side. I believe additional sections with devkit names would be better as finding suitable example codes to test is really hard. For some of the examples, I didn't have any LEDs to see or buttons to press at the given pin. Right side gives you a summary view and there are buttons at the very end where you can open up the application note in your browser and also import the code. Code import is really good and especially helpful with complex codes such as USB projects. The application notes are also well written, they give a brief summary, talk about what hardware is needed and then explain the code section by section.
Here is where I had a problem (also some others may): As the code given for this device is fairly advanced and because of the no pin headers problem, you cannot edit the code to do your bidding. On one example I tried to use the buttons on my Mixed Signal sliceCARD instead of the default GPIO sliceCARD but these were at different tiles of the hardware. Also the port mapping was completely different, GPIO buttons were connected to two consecutive pins of the same port whereas mixed signal buttons were on different ports altogether. This made editing the code hard. Additional sections about editing the basic code can be given to help the developer understand the code and hardware better. This is what Cypress did for their PSoC4 Pioneer kit (insert link to review). I did say that this was bad but now I believe half and half is better: give half of the code which does something and then tell how to program the rest of the demo.
I tried 4 different examples from XMOS for checking out this devkit. Here is a list and some notes about them:
At the beginning I really liked the idea of this devkit, it felt like Propeller on steroids. However due to some major problems related to kit, I was not able to do everything I wanted to do. Hardware needs some work, I'm not sure if it was my board or not but solder filled pin headers were a deal breaker. Software is really nice, easy to install, divided into different sections to show examples. If you are just starting with xCORE architecture, skip this and get the StartKit which is a more basic version focused towards beginners. This is an advanced board towards USB applications and requires previous knowledge of XC. I believe one problem I had was trying to start from a more advanced section of the code due to hardware constraints. My foundation of XC was not solid, thus I couldn't make the changes I wanted to do. But I'm planning to bite the bullet, clean up the board and start from scratch.
