Dangerous Prototypes Open Source Hardware

Re: PIC firmware for new Verilog "Demon Core" releases

Reply #15 – February 09, 2011, 10:43:19 am

Ian, I realize that I was way to simplistic about the update tools (just had in mind what I used last). I'll add more/others but think we should limit the list to a small set. Maybe the Windows GUI tool, the combined ols_fwloader and the original pair of tools. Even this list seems too long to me...

Concerning the FPGA bitstream I have a confusion again. In the 'Feature Status' page mentioned above is said 'Bitstreams v3+ are based on a port of the SUMP VHDL to the Verilog language'. To this implies that there is only one 'full feature' core and this is the verilog 'Demon' v3 core and that the older Sump core is deprecated. Is this correct ?

Re: PIC firmware for new Verilog "Demon Core" releases

Reply #16 – February 09, 2011, 11:09:12 am

I'm sorry, that wasn't intended as a slight against your list :) It is very nice and I think it will be super helpful to maintain that. I thought robots tool was still having issues on random OSes and wasn't ready to be included in an official release list though.

Now that Jack released a package it should be the official release, the other stuff was just a stop-gap for testers until we were ready for a single update release. There will probably have to be one more update, with a PIC firmware v3.0 if the 2.6 tests ok, and any minor updates to the bitstream.

I noticed your edits - it's also really nice to have the full list of new updaters available. I don't think that is in any other place.

Re: PIC firmware for new Verilog "Demon Core" releases

Reply #17 – February 09, 2011, 11:41:33 am

Ian, don't worry am not taking anything as stab against me :-). There is plenty of room for improvement and if I'm not told where the problems are then I can not not fix it.

The official release by Jack is a big improvement. For now many things are moving along at a fast pace and the documentation and the wiki is left behind. In the long run the wiki should be where things are documented and the forum where things are discussed. Recently you had to do too much forum hunting to find stuff and searching through forums is not easy if you did not follow the discussions from the beginning.

For now I'll continue to improve the wiki, as time and understanding permits.

Re: PIC firmware for new Verilog "Demon Core" releases

Reply #18 – February 09, 2011, 06:43:13 pm

Hey guys,

I'll start updating the wiki as well, I somehow missed robots upgrade utility. I will work that into the next version of the OLS Upgrader scripts. The scripts work under Windows and Linux now and a fellow named Uwe has been working with me on my IRC channel to make a debian package. Using robots upgrade utility as the executable might make things easier.

Jack.