Spartan 6 SP601 board .. Need to connect it to a monitor!

[3Deye]

Hi,

I'm going to buy the Spartan 6 SP601 development board since it's the board that I can afford and will fit my design but it lacks a VGA/DVI connector and to test my code, I'll need to send data to a monitor.

My question: Is there any USB/UART to VGA converters available so I can send the data by USB then it's converted to be shown on a monitor ?!

SP601 Product brief:
https://www.xilinx.com/publications/prod_mktg/sp601_product_brief.pdf

SP601 Page:
**broken link removed**

Thanks!

 

[farhada]

Re: Spartan 6 SP601 board .. Need to connect it to a monitor

For VGA, you only need a few resistors and a few digital outputs. For a very simple VGA, you can use 5 IOs, 3 for RGB, one fo HSYNC and one for VSYNC.

If you want to have more colors, then look into the solution done on SPARTAN3E board.

Here you have a simple example of a monochrome VGA circuit that only uses 3 FPGA IOs:

You can also look at the for more info about the subject.

Using USB/VGA connection will be an amazingly complex solution since you have to write your own driver for Xilinx.

Cheers,
/Farhad Abdolian

 

[3Deye]

Re: Spartan 6 SP601 board .. Need to connect it to a monitor

Cool, thanks Farhad.

I think this method is suitable when I am going to design my board using the spartan 6 chip, but in case I already have the board, how can I connect the IO to a VGA port ?! In Spartan 3E for example, there already exist a VGA port, but in SP601 it does not !

 

[farhada]

Re: Spartan 6 SP601 board .. Need to connect it to a monitor

It all depends on what you want to do, if this is only for proof of concept then you need 5 wires out of the FPGA, a few resistors and a VGA connector, then you have VGA support on your board. For that you can use the "8 User I/O (Digilent 2x6 Header)" on that board.
This connector is J13 on the board and it is very simple to use, I am sure you can get up to 800x600x3 bits out of those signals without major issues.

Best regards,
/Farhad Abdolian

 

[3Deye]

It's clear now

Thanks Farhad.

Points+3