Since the last post I’ve been fixing some more bugs in the new serial controller. The most obvious difference is that it’s speed is configurable now. Less obvious, but equally if not more important, is that the stability is much improved, especially in the rx channel. At the time of the last post, however, a flood ping would still cause the controller to lock up. Not any more. It now runs quite stable with SLIP at 38400 BPS. At that speed, the CPU is already doing ~4000 interrupts per second and very near 100% busy – it will not go much faster than that, the link will run at 57600 BPS but the actual throughput will decrease, and the amount of packets received in error will rise considerably at that speed.
Anyway, at the same time I received my order of new goodies – a Nexys3 board and assorted pmods, including the pmodnic100. The pmodnic100 is the first step towards creating a DEUNA-type ethernet controller – that is, it looks like it will be possible to do, what I’m not yet sure of is how much time it is going to take. The interfacing is not very difficult, but it is still going to be a lot of work, and DEUNA is a complicated thing to be compatible with.
The Nexys3 is somewhat of a mixed joy, I must say. From the pricing, I had expected the FPGA to be huge. It is not – it’s effectively smaller than the Nexys2-1200 board I already had. Also, it has only 3rd party prom parts – not the Xilinx proms, so prom programming is only really possible with the Digilent tools, and those only run on Windows. My last remaining Windows pc runs fine, but with one minor issue: I need to keep pushing down the CPU fan – if I let go of it, it comes loose, because the plastic retainer bracket is broken. If that happens, after about 5 seconds the cpu will overheat and shut down – causing Windows to crash. Oh joy.
Digilent in the mean time is very slow about answering support questions – it took them almost two weeks to come up with what I already knew – it’s not possible to program the proms with the Xilinx tools. And, to finish my rant, the difference in build quality if you compare Terasic’s products to Digilent’s is rather big – and the pricing is too, but the wrong way around. Digilent used to do very well – the S3Board was and is a fine product: well thought out, well-engineered, and lovingly produced to decent standards. Apparently something got lost along the way.
What the Nexys3 also brought was somewhat of a surprise – the VGA core did not work on it. And apparently it never worked on the Nexys2 either – I must have forgotten that I never implemented it. Anyway, the issue with Nexys3 was that the spartan-6 is unhappy about asynchronous access to blockram; it should be possible, but the synthesizer seems not to generate the core for it. So, since it didn’t really need to be asynchronous anyway, I changed it to synchronous – and fixed one of the older minor issues, that caused the last scan line to fall off the edge of the VGA screen. And I fixed another bug in the vga core as well – it was impossible to enter a capital U. Also I made lots of updates to the font table – it should look better now, and it will also show control characters in a style similar to a vt100. It’s nowhere near a ‘real’ vt100 yet, though.
Together with one of the nice things about the Nexys3 – the USB Host port for the keyboard – that does create a rather fancy system; I can now connect my new fancy Rapoo wireless mini keyboard. No more big old ugly PS2 keyboards!
I’ll be posting the latest sources later this weekend. Besides the fixes to the terminal core and the serial line controller, there’s also the floating point updates in there. Definitely worth the effort of an upgrade.