[Fpga-synth] ARM + FPGA project progress

[Scott Gravenhorst]

That's very cool Eric, I wanna hear it...  (c:  Something tells me so do you...

"The making of synthesizers in FPGAs." wrote:
>I got the blank PC boards back from BatchPCB on 2-15 and I've been 
>tinkering with the project off & on since then. Currently I've got the 
>ARM, FPGA, USB, LCD, SD card & power supplies working. The ARM firmware 
>to support all these interfaces is coming along nicely as well. Pictures 
>of the progress are here:
>
>http://members.cox.net/ebrombaugh1/synth/armfpga/pix.html
>
>At the moment it's possible to plug the board into a PC and have it show 
>up as a flash disk. You can copy firmware updates and FPGA bitstreams 
>onto the SD card. When you unplug the USB cable, the firmware update is 
>transferred from the SD card into the MCU flash and control is passed to 
>the new firmware. It's also possible to pop the SD card out and copy new 
>code & data directly onto it using a card reader/writer. The next time 
>you power up, it will load the new firmware. Once the firmware is 
>loaded, the file on the SD card is removed and subsequent power-ups jump 
>right into the existing flash application.
>
>The current custom firmware searches the SD card root directory for a 
>file called FPGA.BIT and loads that into the FPGA using slave serial 
>mode. The file is just the bitstream created by the Xilinx tools. This 
>load takes place through one of the ARM's SPI ports (the other is used 
>for the SD card) and takes a couple seconds. The second UART is also 
>being used as a diagnostic port - it reports boot progress and any error 
>conditions. This comes out through a daughter card (not shown) that 
>connects to the MISC I/O header. Other signals on that header are the 
>ADCs, DAC and GPIOs which can be employed for user interface.
>
>Once the FPGA comes up, the SPI port can be reconfigured to talk to the 
>logic design - the same pins used for configuration become user I/O and 
>my test design has a (surprise) SPI slave port hooked up to them.
>
>Still to do - install the SRAM, Codec and support parts. After that its 
>time to start some serious coding. I2C interface to the Codec for 
>configuration of operating modes, MIDI parsing, and brainstorming about 
>what the first synth design will be.
>
>Eric
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>

-- ScottG
________________________________________________________________________
-- Scott Gravenhorst
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