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Digilent Nexys-2 Retired

A project log for Kestrel Computer Project

The Kestrel project is all about freedom of computing and the freedom of learning using a completely open hardware and software design.

samuel-a-falvo-iiSamuel A. Falvo II 05/21/2016 at 20:407 Comments

Well, I'm sad to say that I'm going to have to retire my Digilent Nexys-2 FPGA development board even before committing the first bitstream for the Kestrel-3 to it. It seems Xilinx WebPACK ISE refuses to run its license manager on 64-bit Linux, and their Vivado monstrosity does not support the FPGA that's on my board. So, unless the XS3C1000E somehow magically gets reverse-engineered tomorrow, I have a very expensive, yet not terribly effective, paper-weight.

It looks like I'll be building out a Kestrel-3 motherboard built around iCE40HX-family parts sooner rather than later. I was not looking forward to this. I'm almost certain to miss my deadlines for realizing a working Kestrel-3 in hardware by January of next year, unless someone knows of a development board with two or three iCE40HX-8Ks on it with a 50MHz oscillator, is equipped with PS/2 port(s) for keyboard (and mouse, optionally), a VGA port capable of 512 or better colors, 16MB of RAM, and at least 1MB of flash ROM to store the Kestrel's firmware in.

And for those of you about to suggest Altera FPGAs, please don't. Simply trying to download a working binary from their website resulted not in bits, but depression and anger. If you think Xilinx's Byzantine licensing and registration hoops are bad, you haven't played with Altera's website. Moreover, when I researched their parts, they wanted as much for a programming cable as they did for a typical Terasic development board.

Discussions

Chase Rayfield wrote 05/26/2016 at 18:07 point

Sounds like you are doing something wrong or your environment has gotten corrupted... etc.  Are you running on a distro that us supported Like Redhat etc?

  Are you sure? yes | no

Samuel A. Falvo II wrote 05/26/2016 at 18:49 point

Ubuntu 15.04 LTS.  An earlier version worked fine previously on Linux Mint 12 back in the day.  Both were 64-bit.

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Chase Rayfield wrote 05/26/2016 at 19:02 point

I'd suggest running it in a VM... with a supported distro. Thats just how you have to deal with old software sometimes. That said it should still just work since most of the needed libraries are bundled.... have you tried running xlicmgr or xlcm from the command line? Which type of license are you using?

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Samuel A. Falvo II wrote 05/26/2016 at 19:14 point

I was trying to shoot for the WebPack ISE license, since that's the software that supports my Spartan 3E chip.

I was unaware of xlicmgr or xlcm commands.  I will give them a go when I get the chance; hopefully, if they fail, they'll produce a meaningful and actionable error message to stderr.

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Ed S wrote 05/25/2016 at 07:13 point

Oh I see. That's not so good. I know some people are deliberately running older versions because of device support - I suppose that the older versions are also available to download. 

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Ed S wrote 05/25/2016 at 05:03 point

For some purposes, the linux32 command as a prefix can bypass compatibility problems with 64 bit linux.

    linux32 some command

or for a general purpose session:

    linux32 xterm

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Samuel A. Falvo II wrote 05/25/2016 at 05:59 point

The binaries are all 64-bit though.  And the IDE itself runs fine; it simply won't launch the license manager for some reason.  Nothing on stderr either; there's literally no indication why it failed.

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