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icoBoard Gamma Back in Business

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 03/29/2017 at 16:181 Comment

Yesterday, I decided to breakdown and acquire my first Raspberry Pi computer. I got a RPi 3 and, I must admit, it is a nifty little device. Accolades aside, though, this platform was the original way to program icoBoard FPGA boards, and thought since I cannot raise icoBoard Gamma on any of my Linux OR Windows laptops, I'll try the RPi route. It's cheap enough, so why not?

Immediate success. Not only have I never seen an FPGA program in about a quarter of a second before, but the whole arrangement worked out-of-the-box (except for one brain-fart on my part: if you've attempted to install icoprog for USBaseboard before, be sure to remove those binaries from your path so that the icotools makefiles correctly detect the right way to program the board). Seriously: if you can imagine this as the FPGA world's "MacOS" (where things "just work"), this is it.

Does this mean Kestrel-3 development is back on track? Not quite; I still need to gain employment, and my energy is still focused on that. But, at least I have a working FPGA board again, and I hope one in which I can reliably talk to RAM with.

Discussions

Samuel A. Falvo II wrote 03/29/2017 at 16:32 point

This still leaves the myStorm BlackIce board to worry about.  However, if the BlackIce board can be raised by the RPi, that solves that problem handily.  I'll need to test this arrangement later on.

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