Quartus

2 Articles

Hands On With The Arduino FPGA

November 1, 2018 by 31 Comments

All of the tools you need to work with the FPGA Arduino — the Vidor — are now in the wild!

We reported earlier that a series of French blog posts finally showed how all the pieces fit together to program the FPGA on the Arduino MKR4000 Vidor board. Of course, I wasn’t content to just read the Google translation, I had to break out the board and try myself.

I created a very simple starter template, a tool in C to do the bitstream conversion, required, and bundled it all together in one place. Here’s how you can use my starter kit to do your own FPGA designs using the Vidor. I’m going to assume you know about FPGA basics and Verilog. If you don’t, why not check out the FPGA boot camps first?

The first thing you’ll want to do is grab my GitHub repo. You’ll also need the Arduino IDE (a recent copy) and Intel’s Quartus software. Inside, you’ll find three directories, two of which contain slightly modified copies of original Arduino files. But before you start digging in, let’s get the high-level overview of the process.

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Flash: Arduino Vidor FPGA Instructions Hit France

October 14, 2018 by 12 Comments

If you speak French and you have an Arduino Vidor 4000, you are in luck because there’s some good news. The good news is there’s finally some inside information about how to configure the onboard FPGA yourself. The bad news though is that it is pretty sparse. If your high school French isn’t up to the task, there’s always Google Translate.

We knew some of this already. You’ll need Quartus, the FPGA design tool from Altera — er, Intel — and we know about the sample project on GitHub, too. Instead of using conventional Verilog or VHDL, the new information uses schematic capture, but that’s OK. All the design entry winds up in the same place, so it should be easy to adapt to the language of your choice. In fact, in part 2 they show both some schematics and some Verilog. Google Translate does have a little trouble with code comments, though. If you want something even stouter, there’s an example that uses Verilog to output a video frame.

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