Just getting started in the world of Digital Circuits

[Leep]

I'm one step ahead of ya. I worked through the Nexys 3 tutorial from Digilent's site yesterday to get a (very basic) understanding of the design flow and the tools used (ISE, Adept). That's when I started playing with some little things on my own and got the 3-switch-to-7-LEDs circuit to work and got one 7-segment to show the number 3. Also, I had JUST finished registering at OpenCore when I saw the reply from you here. I was a bit disappointed that it would take a couple of days to get my registration approved. No "instant gratification" for me. Being ADHD and slightly OCD (aren't most good programmers?), the "instant gratification" has a strong pull for me. Over the years I've learned to control it though. I'm disappointed slightly, but I'll live. PLENTY of stuff to play with until I can get into OpenCore.

And the Nexys 3 didn't "come" with anything but the board and a USB cable. I'll check Digilent's website to see if they have a constraint file defining all the pins... I've been looking in the Nexys 3 Reference Manual or at the board itself to try and figure out the pins. It seems like I might be missing something (the equivalent in the software development world of an "SDK") for the Nexys 3. I have the ISE WebPack and Adept software, but nothing (software wise) specific to the Nexys 3.

 

[mrflibble]

I'll check Digilent's website to see if they have a constraint file defining all the pins... I've been looking in the Nexys 3 Reference Manual or at the board itself to try and figure out the pins.

The UCF is in the list of support documents on the bottom of the product page:

http://www.digilentinc.com/Data/Products/NEXYS3/Nexys3_Master_ucf.zip

But seeing your propensity for being one step ahead, no doubt by the time you read this you already found the ucf.

It seems like I might be missing something (the equivalent in the software development world of an "SDK") for the Nexys 3. I have the ISE WebPack and Adept software, but nothing (software wise) specific to the Nexys 3.

Yeah, that is something that seems to be a theme with FPGA development boards. Maybe if you get one of the mucho $$$ boards you get more stuff, I wouldn't know. The boards I have didn't come with significantly more than basic ISE. The digilent boards do come with downloadable EDK goodies, but so far I found the random snippets gathered from around the internets more useful. Usually from other hobbyists or opencores.

Case in point, for the atlys the digilent included ethernet stuff is not very useful IMO. So I grabbed joelby's project files (which as I recall he again based on code from the USRP project), and added some FIFO stuff. Same situation for usb connectivity. Grabbed someone's basic usb code which was again based on something else ... clean up the FSM, slap on decent fifo's and go. Same for I2C.

As long as there's nothing either on opencores or straight from xilinx coregen (non $$$$$$ cores), that kind of situation remains... Maybe I should just unlazy myself, clean up some code and put it on opencores or github or something. *ponder*

 

[Leep]

Yep, as soon as I made that post I went back to digilent's site and got the ucf for the Nexys 3. That would have been handy yesterday. Taking a break for some CoD:MW.