[Coco] DriveWire on the DE1

[Becker, Gary]

The DE1 has a few features that the Digilent Spartan 3 Starter board does not have. Most are not supported, but when I get the time I will include these. First is the microphone input and speaker output. I have not looked into this feature, but would like to include it. The analog board I built for the Spartan 3 board has stereo speaker outputs. Second is the SD Card slot. It appears that this will need to be interfaced using SPI. Lastly the DE1 has 8 Meg of SDRAM. I really do not want to interface this to the 6809 because it would slow it down so much. SDRAM is not random access, so the CPU would have to wait until the memory was ready. I am thinking of using it as a 8M RAM disk. In that application it should be fairly easy to interface.

The Spartan 3 Starter board has 1 Meg of SRAM compared to the DE1 with 512K. I have the analog board that supports the stereo speaker output, second serial port that I use for a serial mouse under NitrOS9, and a Joystick port. The Joystick port supports two PC type joysticks.

A couple of other things I have been forgetting. I want to thank Boisy for the DW interface. It was his specification that I followed. He also wrote the DW driver in less than a day. Also, Aaron has been a solid resource for development. He loaned me his DE1 for a while during early development. And has spent countless hours testing different builds. He has found most of the bugs. Boisy, Aaron, and Mark have been great resources to bounce ideas off of.

Gary


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On Sun, 13 Jun 2010, Becker, Gary wrote: 


> For the last few days I have been doing everything on the DE1. I will 

> update everything for the Xilinx Spartan 3 platform in a few days. Since 

> I have my Sound, Joystick port, and second serial port analog board on 

> the Xilinx platform, I do a lot with it. But when we get all the 

> features of the DE1, sound / SD card, it will be hard to beat. 


So, there will be some peripheral hardware specific for the DE1? Where 
can I find discussion of this? 


> But I 

> intend on supporting all features that the hardware supports on both 

> platforms. 

> 

> I will post the latest builds for the DE1 on the Yahoo group in a day or 

> so. And will post the builds for the Xilinx boards when I get it 

> working. 


I'm sort of in a quandry on direction. I really hate to get locked into a 
development environment that runs only on Windows, since I have to fire up 
a second machine for that purpose. 

Has anyone successfully run Quartus under VMware on a Linux host? 

Steve