Information Lost ?

[theover]

Hello Adapteva creators and users,

I think a lot of electronics minded people have noticed what this cheap (but good) and Open Source effort is lacking at the moment.

There seems to be a disruption in working projects at the GIT repository, little activity about the cores of this project, and little communication about how this is all going to be!

I had a fine XILINX ISE Webpack 14.7 setup that I still can use to create a working .bit file for the FPGA startup read, and I have a "latest" all-in download that has a new Linux and a built in FPGA file and a new setup which allows user space access to the Epiphany chip. That's good, so that's worth a positive reflection. herewith.

But apart from that: I have no working git or otherwise FPGA setup, for either the nice Analog Devices HDMI interface code or even the basic AXI/Epiphany interface code (headless) that I can get through my Vivado's (which includes the latest 2015.3). Now I am not a savvy HDL programmer, though I sure can follow all the parts of a normal hardware design, and could draw the basic requirements of the basics of this project on a beer felt. Honestly, with all the hustling going on, I wouldn't want to be much of a HDL savvy man, because there are some flaws that everybody seems to take for granted and "work" on without deeply understanding the basics of functional and state machine design coupled with the basics of digital electronics, as well as communicating systems theory. Now, nobody has to, but once again a nice project seems to get lost in the mire of hardware design languages and moderate goal definitions, I publically wonder what the point is.

So what would be cool is to have versions of the Parallella project available for either Ise Webpack or Vivado web edition (both free for download) that can be downloaded from web page or Git such that they compile with no trouble on some prescribed version of either Xilinx tools, and preferably in version: vanilla (only dummy connections, for small FPGA projects to try out), headless (like the current headless) and Hdmi (obvious).

Of course a nice tutorial for the various options and versions would be cool, in decent English and for the Free tools (not many people are going to buy a thousands of $s software package to play with a $100 board), and with some continuity in the learning process.

That would sure gain my respect.

Theo V.