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FPGA HELP; So lost and confused.

rgiguere

Ok so I bought a Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 (has the Intel Cyclone 10 LP FPGA) and I am so damn confused!

 

Does anyone actually know how to program the FPGA? There is absolutely no documentation that I can find on programming the FPGA part of the board, just that you have to use the Quartus Prime IDE from Intel. I found one site that gave a quick example the link is below, but whenever I attempt the example I get a mountain of errors when I start the compilation process. I've tried multiple times to no avail. Also it says that after compiling the project I have to run a JAVA Program to "invert" the compiled ttf file and change it to a .h library file for arduino. If this is the case how the hell does it work? do you just include the library and call some sort of function from it using arduino? this seems like a god awful, horible way to do something like this. I know I am an absolute noob when it comes to FPGAs but this seems ridiculous, Arduino is know for ease of use and this so far has not been easy to use in any way. I could really use some pointers on how to actually program the Vidor4000 FPGA. Whether complicated or not I'm on a rather limited budget because I'm in school and a single dad of three and I guess I made a poor assumption that getting an Arduino FPGA would make the learning process a slight bit easier. So please anyone that has or knows of any documentation to program this damn thing I more be very appreciative.

  • Hi Robert,

     

    As I understand (I could be wrong, this is just what I've heard), today the FPGA is intended to be used with its existing configuration, i.e. it provides some pre-built hardware acceleration features that are usable from your code. In future the possibility to program it will be available, and so I'm guessing Arduino's documentation for that isn't available yet.

    Having said that, it is an off-the-shelf FPGA, so those who are already familiar with them could download the IDE and develop their own functionality. You mention you're a newcomer to FPGAs, so it will not be easy at all I'm afraid, until someone has written tutorials/documentation on how to do this with that board. The reason it is difficult, is that there is some device- and manufacturer-specific stuff to learning how the development environment is used, and also the 'code' that is written needs to describe hardware signal flows, so that needs training material that is different to (say) C or Java programming which doesn't describe such hardware and signal flows at all.

    If you want to get prepared to use the FPGA for when the documentation is available, then books on a hardware description language (e.g. VHDL or Verilog) could be useful, plus a book on digital logic.

  • in reply to shabaz

    Shabaz

    Thank you for the insight.  I figured that because all other Arduino products were simple to use that the Vidor4000 would be let's say an intro board to FPGA programming but I was wrong,  big time so I went ahead and got a MOJO FPGA and a few sheilds for it. Much easier to use when just learning about fpgas