[Fpga-synth] Inexpensive development environment

[Mason]

Indeed, Eric, your message was enough to cause me to look again at
getting iMPACT to work with my -3AN starter kit under Linux (I gave up
for a while, assuming I was missing something that would be fixed in a
later service pack). The cable was not being programmed properly, and
it turns out this is because when using libusb the udev rule that
transfers the firmware to the board needs an app called fxload, which
is mentioned casually in one of the answer records hidden in the
basement in a locked file cabinet as something that you should,
naturally, have installed.
So now I'm running ISE on my Aspire One, and able to blink my LEDs again.

Do you have any tips for making ISE take up less of the precious
screen real estate of a netbook? I'm already running a tiling window
manager so that it's fullscreen, but it feels like there should be a
way to shrink font and widget sizes and strip out things that I don't
need.

--Mason

2009/1/19 narendra sisodiya <narendra.sisodiya at gmail.com>:
> Thanks a lot for sharing this info !!
>
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Eric Brombaugh <ebrombaugh1 at cox.net> wrote:
>>
>> Slightly OT -
>>
>> A few weeks back I picked up an ASUS EEE PC 900A a local big-box
>> electronic store: 1.6GHz Intel Atom, 1GB DRAM, 4GB SDD, WiFi, Xandros Linux.
>> $200 (!). Xandros Linux was poorly configured and had to go, but Ubuntu eee
>> (Now called Easy Peasy) works nicely.
>>
>> I downloaded Xilinx ISE Webpack 10.1.03 for Linux onto a desktop machine,
>> stripped out the documentation, Coregen, VHDL (not my language) and a lot of
>> the unused FPGA/CPLD families. This brought the total install size down to
>> 1.9GB - sufficiently small to fit onto a 2GB SD card which fits in an
>> available slot on the EEE. I also grabbed a tarball of the arm-elf-gcc
>> toolchain and installed that onto the main 4GB SDD. For board design I've
>> installed free gEDA & PCB tools. For ARM download/debug I've got the Olimex
>> JTAG-USB-TINY and openocd. All that's missing is an open-source FPGA
>> download capability.
>>
>> I've now got a portable full-up ARM + FPGA + board design environment for
>> a total investment of less than $250.
>>
>> Beat that!
>>
>> Eric
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>
>
>
> --
> ┌─────────────────────────┐
> │    Narendra Sisodiya
> │    R&D Engineer
> │    http://narendra.techfandu.org
> └─────────────────────────┘
>
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