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  • Author Author: Former Member
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Entering The World Of FPGA's with a DEO-NANO P0082 - Part 1

Former Member
Former Member

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Recently I was selected to roadtest the terasIC DEO-NANO P0082 fpga development kit. My application was based around reviewing the P0082 for suitability as an entry level device to simplify the process of people wanting to explore fpga development for the first time.

 

As part of that roadtest application I offered to post regular blogs here in the fgpa group on element14 documenting my progress, this first post centered around the unboxing and first impressions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Box Contains:

            - P0082 development board

            - Mini USB cable

            - Quick start guide

            - Brochures for other products

 

I always like getting brochures for other products!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Quick start guide

 

Page 1 has a picture of the P0082 development board with labels to highlight the specific components.

Page 2 contains a brief introduction and a list of relevant software you will need to install to develope with the P0082.

Page 3 is an overview of the pre-loaded demonstration and links of where to download further demonstrations.

Page 4 looks at a control panel demonstration and a system builder tool to enable quick development on the P0082 (I'd imagine a project setup wizard).

 

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The P0082 development board looks well made, comes with a clear acrylic protective top cover and has standoffs to raise the bottom of the board from the surface its stood on which is a nice touch. The main component of the board is an Altera Cyclone 4. From what I understand at the moment, the Altera fpga loses all of it's configuration when power is removed and re-configures itself using an external EEPROM. To the left hand side of the board there is an I2C EEPROM so I'm assuming that this is where your compiled program (is that what you call it?) is downloaded from your computer onto ready for the fpga to read upon next power up.

 

Positive Comments

 

The development kit looks reasonably well presented, the quickstart guide is easy to follow and gives me confidence that the product is a worthy contender as an introductory device to the world of fpga's

 

Negative comments

 

One of the pins for the external power header is slightly bent, this coupled with the box looking rather worn and the software cd's that are supposed to be included are missing leads me to think this is a pre-used kit. Keep in mind though that this product was sent as a roadtest product and not one that has been purchased as new. Luckily the software packages can be downloaded easily enough so the missing cd's aren't a huge problem. Fingers crossed the board does function, I'll find out in due time!!

(edit) *after a quick power-up test, the P0082 is working fine and preloaded with the flashing led demo.

 

 

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* Pictures taken with my new general purpose camera Canon EOS 750D

  • in reply to mcb1

    mcb1 wrote:


    The thing running around in my head (other than the hampster) is what would I use FPGA's for.

    Currently I don't have a burning need for a use, so it's probably better that I concentrate on some other item I keep putting off.

    That's a quandry faced by FPGA makers.  MCUs can do so many jobs these days that making the jump to FPGAs keeps getting harder to justify.

     

    My personal soapbox for the last 30 years or so is that FPGA vendors have held themselves back by refusing to publish their bitstream formats so people are limited to the tools and languages provided by the vendors.  Intel thinks that by acquiring Altera they'll be able to get into custom processing engines for big data.  Good luck, guys.  As long as it's so difficult to design FPGAs it's going to be simpler just to throw more processor cores at problems.

     

    Fortunately, there's IceStorm for the Lattice iCE40 FPGA family.  Unfortunately, those FPGAs are rather small.  But it's a major step in the right direction.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    It's worthwhile - but steep

    I'm sure it is, and the resources and tools market seems to be more open now.

     

    The thing running around in my head (other than the hampster) is what would I use FPGA's for.

    Currently I don't have a burning need for a use, so it's probably better that I concentrate on some other item I keep putting off.

     

    At least I have a couple of people to touch base with if I step off the abysis. image

    Cheers

    Mark

  • in reply to mcb1

    It's worthwhile - but steep - . It's taking me several years to become reasonably fluent. I can now build basic logic designs.

    The biggest steps I've taken were when I worked from the tutorials of e14 members https://twitter.com/field_hamster  and https://twitter.com/devbisme .

    Michael for his excellent VHDL tutorial and code base, Dave for the great  (really great) examples.

     

    My original education is electronics. Then IT.

    I had to warp back to my electronics education to get the grip on FPGAs.

  • Always looked at FPGA's and decided that they are another thing I should learn ... but what do I sacrifice to do it.

    So I'll be following this with some interest ... even if it is for a rainy day.

     

    I like the other advice that is coming. It helps build a bigger picture of how best to use the device in a real world situation.

     

    Mark

  • in reply to Former Member

    That's good - it will enable you to confirm that your drive waveforms to the tile are correct. Much easier than doing it blind.

     

    The 'scope is also good for debugging in general - there will be plenty of spare FPGA pins available, so you can route out duplicates of internal signals and look at them as a (quick) alternative to simulation if you want to.

     

    I don't know what you're thinking for your design, but the FPGA has blocks of dedicated memory, so one approach would be to internally store an image sent from a processor in memory and then scan it out to the LED matrix. The internal memory is very nice to work with - it's dual port and is very fast. On the Xilinx parts, that dedicated memory can be initialised from the bitstream (which allows it to be used as a ROM) - I imagine that the Altera parts do something similar. I used VHDL [I don't know Verilog at all] and there the initialisation is done, when the memory is instantiated in the code, with strings of hex values, not too dissimilar to how you'd initialise an array in C. I used to throw together simple C programs to generate appropriately formatted hex values that I could then just paste into the VHDL. It's also a useful technique for look-up tables of the sort you'd use for gamma correction and tasks like that.