About connecting pins in Spartan 3E Starter Kit via SPI

[vccy118]

Guys, I need help with connecting pins from an external device to Spartan 3E Starter Kit using SPI interface.

According to the Spatan 3E Starter Board User Guide, the physical pins assocciated with SPI Interface is the 6-pin DAC Header (FIgure 9-1, pg. 69) and SPI_MOSI: (T4), SPI_MISO: (N10), SPI_SCK: (U16), DAC_CS: (N8), and DAC_CLR: (P8).



I want to connect a Microchip MRF24J40MA Zigbee Module to the Spartan 3E board via SPI interface and the pin diagram is as stated in the User Guide (Figure 1, pg. 1). I already soldered wires to all the pins on the Zigbee Module and is now wondering how to physically connect these 2 device together.



I also used the SPI codes for CoolRunner2, taken from here.

The purpose of doing this is to connect 3 Spartan 3E Starter Boards together using 3 individual Microchip MRF24J40MA Zigbee Modules.


What else I should do? This is my first time playing around with the SPI interface and I hope I can get some help here, thanks!

 

[kostbill]

Hi.

I would do two things. But I don't know how to do the first thing yet, only the second .

1. Output the SPI pins in the FX2 Hiroshe connector. I think that it is doable if you play with the UCF and/or MHS files but I don't know how to do it yet. I am going to have to learn because I want to do the same thing, only I am going to do it with an external CODEC.

2. Hook up the external device in a board with the coresponding female FX2 Hiroshe connector. I already bouth this board: http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,648,561&Prod=FX2BB and it is great.

Bill.

[edit]: I mentioned the MHS because I dogmatically assumed that you are using microblaze like me! If you are not, I guess you will not have to play with the MHS file.

 

[vccy118]

I am using ISE actually, VHDL coding.

I already soldered the Zigbee Module to connectors, just need to know where the connectors should go so I can start testing either it works or not

If it doesn't work... then I guess I will have another problem.

 

[kostbill]

I am confused, what do you mean? You soldered them in what connectors? If you don't know the connectors, how did you buy them?