The goal for this week was to set up a network, a way to transfer files, run a c program that uses the fpga peripherals, and have a program for the controller to talk to the soc.
I spent the initial phases of the week setting up minicom and transferring files. Ideally, I’d be able to scp files from the linux vm to the board and vice versa, but there was no means of setting up a network, which is why I ordered the ethernet peripherals.
In the meantime as a backup, I set up minicom. Since the board had no internet or network, there was no way of downloading any software onto and any other source of obtaining files other than direct serial com, I had to figure out a way to transfer files that didn’t involve xmodem or another decoding service. After much trial and error, I decided to go with base_64 as a primitive decoding service to transfer basic c files.
I then set up cross compilation and download intel fpga embedded suite which didn’t have a lite version as claimed in the guide :(. However, I found out about community version that some older versions came with and got it installed instead, and fixed issues with paths and root permissions as ece341.
Unfortunately, the ece341 VM comes with the memory portions pre-segmented and frozen, though I gave the VM extra gigs, it went towards an unallocated pool since the swap memory followed the /sda disk space. I installed gparted and though possibly jank, booted the ece341 VM onto the linux OS image that acts as host for gparted, and reassigned disk space by manually moving the swap memory placement. This took me quite a while to figure out.
Today, finally managed to set up ethernet connection. Getting right parameters configured, understanding network interfaces and different parameters, /etc/ folders relating to startup scripts and network and device dir, various commands relating to networking..
Now i can scp files, and set have run scp’d a c file compiled binary that I used to talk to the HPS peripherals.
Goals for next week include receiving signals from the USB hub and looking into Memory mapped RAM and game state saving.