by Jan Marjanovic
on Tue 18 October 2016

Category: FPGA, Xilinx, Books,

I recently found a great book explaining in details FPGA workflow for Xilinx tools, titled 100 Power Tips for FPGA Designers. Evgeni Stavinov is an experienced FPGA designer who previously worked for Xilinx. It is not evident from the title, but this book focuses almost entirely on the Xilinx, while …

Debugging Linux start-up on Altera Cyclone V SoC with OpenOCD

by Jan Marjanovic
on Tue 12 July 2016

Category: FPGA, Altera, Linux, OpenOCD,

This blog post will show you how one can use the OpenOCD debugger with Altera Cyclone V SoC. Altera Cyclone V SoC is a very interesting integrated circuit, combining dual-core ARM processor and a decent FPGA, allowing a wide variety of possibilities to partition the application between the two.

Xilinx …

Books read: 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 05 June 2016

Category: Books, Software Engineering,

I have seen this book referenced on several occasions when the software engineering was discussed, but I never had the time to read from first page to the last. I bought the dead-tree version, which gives you a better motivation to read the whole book. Here are my comments and …

HDL data type for Python parser implementations

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 15 November 2015

Category: Python, Verilog, FPGA, HDL,

Recently I had to implement a parser for the PCIe protocol. The data was captured with Xilinx ChipScope and saved as TSV (tab-separated value) text file. I wanted to implement a parser in Python, my favorite language for this kind of tasks. I have stumbled to a problem when I …

Compilation of Linux kernel for Raspberry Pi

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 01 March 2015

Category: Linux, Raspberry Pi,

Yesterday I got my Raspberry Pi 2, the evolution of the legendary Raspberry Pi. The evolution is the right word to describe what has changed compared to the previous version. The processor it is now a quad-core, it runs faster, it has got a newer instruction set (ARMv7) and the …

Lattice iCEcube2 on Ubuntu 14.04

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 01 March 2015

Category: Lattice, iCE40, Linux, Ubuntu,

/home/jan/opt/lscc/iCEcube2.2014.12/synpbase/bin/synplify_pro: 186: [: unexpected operator /home/jan/opt/lscc/iCEcube2.2014.12/synpbase/bin/synplify_pro: 200: [: !=: argument expected /home/jan/opt/lscc/iCEcube2.2014.12/synpbase/bin/c_hdl: 186: [: unexpected operator /home/jan/opt/lscc/iCEcube2.2014.12/synpbase/bin/c_hdl: 200 …

Lattice iCE40 configuration using Raspberry Pi

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 18 January 2015

Category: Lattice, iCE40, FPGA, Raspberry Pi, bash,

As I mentioned in previous post, I started playing around with Lattice iCE40 FPGA. In the last post I did a quick overview of the iCE40 tools. The iCEcube2 cannot compete with Xilinx ISE and Altera Quartus II, not to mention the Vivado, but since this is a low-cost FPGA …

My first encounter with Lattice Semiconductor

by Jan Marjanovic
on Wed 24 December 2014

Category: Lattice, iCE40, FPGA,

The FPGA market is one of those classical markets where there are two players who have nearly 100% market share, e.g. PC processors (Intel and AMD), graphic cards (NVIDIA and ATI), ... The two mayor players on the FPGA market are Xilinx and Altera. Both of this two companies follows …

Theremin First Demo

by Jan Marjanovic
on Tue 18 November 2014

Category: Theremin,

During the weekend I was able to take some time to do first test of the theremin. Here are two recordings of my friend Luka playing.

There are some more articles explaining how digital theremin works coming, remember to check out my blog.

I just got a Nintendo 64

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 16 November 2014

Category: Nintendo 64,

I just got a Nintendo 64, my friend Rok was kind enough to lend it.

Nintendo 64

I have an interesting project in mind, I will keep you updated. Rok will for sure be the first one to get the alpha version.