[Coco] Howto for Altera DE1?

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Stephen Adolph <twospruces at gmail.com> wrote:
> you are joking right?
>
> You don't see the pitfalls here?  People shell out a few hundred
> dollars, with little to no experience with FPGAs and hardware in
> general, and they want to play with a fast coco3.

First, $150 is not a few hundred dollars.

> There is a very
> real chance that for the average user this can be very confusing and
> possibly impossible, even if it seems simple to an EE.
>
> How many ways can someone tank the hardware on a bare board
> development system?  These cards are intended for lab environments.
>

No, the DE1 is designed for educational programs and experimenters.
You can find the board being played with by kids in college courses
all over the place, (youtube search for DE1 or Altera will show you
their projects).   They are relatively hardy, I certainly don't show
any special care for mine, have shipped it back and forth across the
country etc, no issues.

> The chances of success here (by success I mean that an interested
> person could buy an FPGA board and have good chances of getting it to
> work) are improved by
>
> * limiting the hardware that is recommended
> * controlling the number of variations that need to be documented
> * minimizing any tasks that need one to be trained in FPGAs or
> hardware in general.
>

The current process does not require one to be trained in FPGA or
hardware whatsoever.  Trust me, I know, because I don't know a thing
about either one.  It does require you to know how to use some basic
tools that come with the board.  There are a lot of different FPGA
projects and they all work the same basic way, so this isn't specific
to the CoCo3FPGA project but sure, a quick getting started guide would
be nice.  You can look at the docs for a project like the FPGA x86
implementation (forget the name now) or the Apple II, or the Amiga,
and get a very good idea of what needs to be done in general terms.
Steve's recent experience seems to be a worst case combination of
things... using a platform the DE1 software doesn't support for
starters.  From the small number of people I know using CoCo3FPGA,
I've seen no one else run into nearly so much trouble.

>
> Look, it is great and exciting to see people strive to an objective
> and succeed, and everyone is happy to see something new come together.
>  Naturally people will be interested.  However, making it
> difficult/variable/challenging is just going to make everyone unhappy.
>

It may be my fault for talking here about how great the CoCo3FPGA
project is without properly adding disclaimers. It does work very
well, I use it almost daily and the few small issues I've found have
all been corrected by Gary.  However: Disclaimer - you are going to
have to be willing to figure some things out on your own and there
aren't much docs yet.  It is very much a work in progress!

> The easiest first step is to nominate a platform and stick with it.

Dropping support for any of the platforms it currently works on is
sure to make folks unhappy.
As long as Gary is willing to tweak the code for a particular
platform, I just cannot see what benefit there is to asking him not to
support it?  Failing to see what benefit limiting people to a single
board brings. The setup process is really quite simple on the DE1 and
I bet its simple on the Spartan boards too.  All we need is a quick
"how to" for each board, combined with a little help from either this
list or the CoCo3FPGA's own list, and everything will be fine.

>
> I know very well that once someone has an RTL description of a COCO3
> working, it can be ported to other FPGAs and other development cards.
>  That is best left for electrical engineers.  Even it you succeed in
> porting it, why would you choose to complicate things?
>
>
> ...Steve
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:
>> Stephen Adolph wrote:
>>
>>> Yah, I was really smoking it to suggest that the community pick a
>>> hardware platform and stick with it.  What was I thinking?
>>
>> Not quite sure what you're getting at here? (and yes, I see the sarcasm)
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> --
>> |              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
>> |  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"
>>
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