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.
CMOD 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!
