Colorligth i9 board

[Jo mo]

Hello guys,

So i received this week my new colorligth i9 board.

colorligth i9 :   - 43848  LUTS  and FFs  ,  108 Bram ,  72 18x18multipliers ,  4 PLL ,   4 DLL

colorligth i5 :   - 24288  LUTS  and FFs  ,   56 Bram ,   28 18x18multipliers ,  2 PLL ,   4 DLL

After:

- doing the same mod as i did for the i5 (addition of 4 jtag header pins and insulation tape) see my post of the 13 april 2021 

 - and adding this i9 board in the icestudio / apio files.

 i could use it successfully!

You can see bellow the "led blink" test !

On the center ( under test) you can see the  colorligth i9 (black pcb)

On the left side you can see the unplugged colorligth i5 (green pcb)

@Juan: if you are ok with it, i can try to pull request the mods to the apio and icestudio repositories?

have a beautifull Sunday

[Juan Gonzalez Gomez]

Great! Yes! Please, your pull-reqs are very welcome! 😀

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[Jo mo]

ok! So the PRs are done !

Thanks Juan

[Juan Gonzalez Gomez]

Merged! Thanks a lot for your contribution! I am looking forward to buying a colorlight 😀

Best regards, Juan

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[Jo mo]

Ok, i will reinstall icestudio to see if everythinks works!

For the colorligth boards suply, i bougth mines from muse lab factory store the i9 arrived in France in one week !

For quantities above 5 boards (group buys) it seams that they can be bought cheaper from  https://colorlight-store.com/product-category/i-receiving-series/      BUT I DID NOT TESTED that buy, so no idea about delivery times and reliability !

And any way, we need a motherboard sold by muse lab factory to use the colorligth i5 and i9!

Or we can design our own "FPGAwars mother board" !  

I am designing my own for my "audio" project!

[Jo mo]

So i reinstalled icestudio.

And i have no resources shown when i build (not build details in the command output windows)!

But the build is done correctly because i can then upload successfully the design to the board!

I try building for other board like Alhambra and i have the same no resources shown!

remark: my previous icestudio installation (on top of which i did my colorligth i9 mods) was not the very last one,  so maybe the problem was already there before my pull request of today ? !

Any idea?

[Jo mo]

and the comand output window:

[charli va]

Hi jo! I’m gong to buy your same colorlight to try to help you and try your things!

Thanks a lot for your support!

[Jo mo]

Hola,

little update, i got by my resources display!

Simply by removing the development version of the toolchain and reinstalling it again !

so everything OK so far !

[Jo mo]

Argh, no, in fact the problem is not yet solved,

after managing to get the resources back for an ice file build, i closed that ice file file.

than when i reopen a file a try building it, the resource are again not displayed! (and this for all the boards)

i may have done something bad with my PRs (maybe something forgotten) which broke the resources display for all the boards types ? !!

Today, i did a lot of reinstalls of icestudio versions ( 0.9.2w202205291005-win64   and 0.9.2w202205241105-win64) and toolchain (stable and develop ).

Sometimes de resources are back (with last apio and icestudio version) but it doesn't last for long!

I did not yet understood the problem! So i will continue investigating!

[Jo mo]

Ok, so it seams the problem is with apio 0.8.2

1. i install the last icestudio 0.9.2w202205291005-win64  and the last stable apio 0.8.1

and i can build the blinky led.ice for alhambra .

i can close and reopen icestudio and the builds always display Alhambra resources.

2. i instal the dev toolchain apio 0.8.2

Without restarting icestudio, i can build the blinky led.ice with the resources displayed

- 3. I close and relaunch icestudio and try again the build of the blinky led.ice and these time the build doesn't display any-more the resources

Remark/ maybe a hint for a solution: as you can see (red arrow on those pictures), the build after the icestudio restart show a different "APIO_VERSION" number field  (0 instead of 2) ?

Workaround, For now, to be able to used normally the colorligth i9 board,

i have:

- installed the last version of icestudio but with apio 0.8.1 (stable) only.

- and i copied/overwrite manually my new board.json (from the last apio0.8.2) in the  "C:\Users\<username>\.icestudio\venv\Lib\site-packages\apio\resources\"  directory

and the resources are displayed even after multiple restarts of icestudio !

After a little sleep, for me, it will be time to try a bit last crazy Democritos 1/n  math design ;-)

A hug and have a nice day guys !

[Obijuan]

Thanks for the information Joaquim!

I've already ordered a Colorlight 5a-75b from muselab, to get familiar with these kind of boards. Then I will buy other models (i5, i9...)

Best regards, Obijuan

[Obijuan]

Hi Joaquim!

I will have a look at it once Icestudio 0.10 is released (there have appeared many critical bugs).  Apio 0.8.2 will be integrated in the next cycle (Releasing apio 0.8.2  is the first thing I am going to do after the release of Icestudio 0.10)

I will keep you informed

Best regards, Juan

[beni...@gmail.com]

Obijuan,

To work with the Colorlight 5A-75B you need to use a FT2232H programmer.
Do not Forget to get one
I recommend this FT2232H board -->  https://es.aliexpress.com/item/2251832620503659.html

Instructions to connect the FT2232H board to the Colorlight board -->  https://github.com/benitoss/ColorLight_FPGA_boards#jtag-programmers

In theory you can work with other programmers as FT232H and USB-Blaster but, we have to modify the configuration of ICeStudio and Appio to support them.

Those programmers are working perfectly with the Colorlight 5A-75E board

Regards

Fernando (Benitoss)

[Obijuan]

Thanks for the information Fernando!

I've have just received my Color-light 5A-75B from aliexpress

I am still waiting for the JTAG programmer to arrive (I've bought the one you are recomending)

When I receive it, I will follow you instructions to get started

Thanks again for sharing the information

Best regards, Obijuan

[Juan Gonzalez Gomez]

I have my Colorlight 5A-75B v8.0 working!

This is the connection to the JTAG programmer:

I've written some documentation (in Spanish) in this link:

https://github.com/Obijuan/Cuadernos-tecnicos-FPGAs-libres/wiki/Tarjeta-ColorLight-5A-75B-V8.0

There you can find some hello world examples in both Apio and Icestudio

Best regards, Obijuan

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[Jo mo]

Hola Juan,

Congratulations for this achievement !

And thanks a lot for the wiki documentation you wrote.

For those testing this board and having problems installing it, you can have a look at one of the  Fernando's thread in this group  .  There is a lot potentially usefull !

He also explained very well the driver installation process (for icestudio) in one of his github pages

Gracias and have a nice day!