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  • Author Author: strb
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My first step into the FPGA world

strb

Almost a year ago, I received a very nice surprise from e14. Unfortunately, until now it sat aside, waiting for some love. This is going to change soon!

The board

The CMOD S7 from Digilent is a very nice little board, fitted with a Spartan 7 FPGA at its core. This evaluation board comes fitted with two buttons and multiple leds for beginner projects and can be easily interfaced with a breadboard or a standard socket thanks to standard 2.54mm through-hole pins.

imageCMOD S7 image, from Digilent website

Getting started

Digilent provides a well-explained step-by-step procedure to get started with this board, and I had just to follow instructions. One particular thing that I noticed almost instantly is the storage requirements for installing the development environment! I installed the bare minimum for this board only, and still it needs more than 30GB! Still, the lengthy installation process went smoothly without a hitch.

Starting with the usual blinky has been nice and easy thanks to this excellent tutorial from Digilent. I then decided to challenge myself with something a bit more complex, opting for an r-g-b "heartbeat sequence" with selectable speed.
This apparently simple task provided far more challenges than I could have anticipated. I had to bring back VHDL from my university course and properly plan the implementation of every subcircuit, designing the structure for debounce, clock management, pwm circuit and sequencing circuit.

I had great fun in the process, learned a lot and after a few attempts I got the result I was hoping for.

Thank you for reading along and thanks to the e14 community that provided me the opportunity to make my first step into the FPGA world!

  • Nice post.

    FPGA offers a lot of capability, but with that power comes a lot of knowledge needed to take advantage of it.

    Keep us informed as you move on to more complex projects.

  • in reply to jc2048

    "..the white tool on the left of the picture is for lifting PLCC packages out of their sockets"
    Cool! I've never seen such tool but I often wondered how to remove these ICs without damaging them ( yes, I used a flat screwdriver a couple times... Sweat smile but to my excuse, I was playing with broken boards Slight smile)

  • Nice prize. A neat way to develop further the logic design you did at university and practice with HDL writing.

    "...and still it needs more than 30GB!"

    Back in 1989, this was what you got if you bought the dev system. Six floppy discs (so would be less than 10MB total).

    image

    I think that cost several thousand dollars (the small black box, with a connector each end, is a dongle that had to be plugged into the printer port for the software to operate).

    Bit of trivia: the white tool on the left of the picture is for lifting PLCC packages out of their sockets.

  • Looks like a nice little dev board.  Yeah I was floored by the 30GB as well when I installed the software.