Parallella FPGA Tutorials available

[yanidubin]

[steddyman]

I've downloaded and opened the project in PlanAhead again to double check for errors and I see this when he project is first loaded:

[Edk 24-162] The device settings for system.xmp does not match with the current project. Please change the device settings in the current project to match with XMP project.

I suspect this relates to my issue. This is the source project downloaded straight from the Github repository.

[steddyman]

[yanidubin]

Okay - but I suspect the license is a red herring (everyone gets that one, and generally it does continue to work). I don't see why the licensing would be handled differently on your version of windows.

If you are unable to open a known good working project with XPS, then we can determine that it isn't a source issue. I suggest you try opening an unmolested project (either one of the pre-canned tutorial projects from my github based on HDMI-less, or any of the ones from parallella-hw). If this works, then you have verified that firstly the XPS does work without the license, and secondly that the XPS is stable on your version of Windows, and the project is the problem. If it doesn't however, there are still two potential issues. Licensing, or general stability.

Unfortunately, I can't find any log file the tool would spit out with the reason for the crash. I don't think the one at sources_1/system/system.log will be of any help, as this seems to be the output of the compile command and you don't get that far. And while planAhead keeps a journal file (planAhead.jou), I don't believe the XPS does.

I have been lucky in that whenever I have tried to load a malformed project (invalid path in hand edited file, or missing folder), I got a dialogue box error before it crashed. If it tells you nothing before it dies, I would speculate it might be unstable. Does it exit cleanly, or does Windows report the application as having crashed?

[yanidubin]

[steddyman]

HI

Sorry for the delay in replying and thanks for your help once again. I have copied down your repo and placed it alongside the parallella-hw directory (mine was called parallella-hw-master but I renamed it).

When I open Tutorial004_SimpleALU, I get the same message as above about the device settings do not match. When I double click the system.xmp in PlanAhead, it again reports the license error (ignored) then reports it can't find axi4lite.... I point it at the correct directory in the edk_user_repository, then it goes away and thinks about it for a while then does exactly the same again and XPS just closes itself.

I noticed I also get this error reported twice before the device settings one (I get them with the original project too):

CRITICAL WARNING: [Edk 24-160] BXML file generation failed for source 'system'. Please see console for any errors/warnings that may be reported.

The last thing that appears before XPS closes after a long pause is the menu title changes to System Assembly View. If I close the License Manager window that pops up, then the XPS immediately goes Not Responding and then quits shortly after. If I leave the License Manager open then I see the System Assembly View title change then the window closes.

This problem is similar to what happened with PlanAhead prior to the DLL patch for Windows 8.1:

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontr ... -8-64-bit/

I have also made the same DLL changes in the EDK/lib/nt64 directory but it makes no difference.
Thanks again for your help.

[yanidubin]

I did a quick test before bed, and it looks like this project works to the point of loading/using the XPS for me. I did a clean checkout to a new folder of the two repos, and loaded that project (would not have been surprised if it was broken - this is a tutorial I have written 90%, but never got around to publishing it - so likely hasn't had many people try and build it). I had no issues locating the edk repository. I believe I deliberately used relative links, so you should not have had any issues here.

I launched the XPS from planAhead (via system.xmp right click and open), and could generate a netlist. I did note it deleting a bunch of ports when it fired up, but this was informational rather than a warning/error. When I try to build from planAhead however, it trips over this.

The issue is that while parallella-hw was barely changing when I wrote these, it seems to have been updated since. So I will post the compatible point in their repo for people to use in the first instance, and ultimately update the sources to work with the current tip. I daresay there is a fairly minimal change I need to apply to any files cloned into each project. Once that is done, they will work again.

I have a few other projects taking priority at present - so it may take a little while.

[yanidubin]

For anyone having incompatibility issues with parallella-hw, the working folder I was using when I last worked on this was at changeset ce97134bc01e8f3b8374e0e74b2ca191c8873f59. So it you want to work through the tutorials, go with this until I update the code.

[steddyman]

I found a better fix for ISE under Windows 8.1 here, which instead copies over the DLL's from Vivado to fix startup and license issues:

http://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Installatio ... 650/page/6

However, I am still seeing the same behavior with XPS closing, but I now think it is a different issue to the device settings error. I have noticed that if I open the 7020 HDMI project, and click on system_i and look at the Source Node Properties, it reports the Part as: "No part found". If I open the 7020 Headless or the 7010 projects they all correctly report the relevant XC part number in that field. I have downloaded the entire tree again from Github, so this is definitely an issue with the repository.

When I open one of the other projects that correctly report the part number for the Zynq, they open without reporting the error. However, agin XPS reports the license error, waits about 1 minute then closes automatically (crashes?). So the error about device mismatch is not what is causing XPS to crash.

[steddyman]

Confirmed. The crashing issue is an incompatibility with Windows 8.1.

I installed ISE on an old Windows 7 64-bit VM I have and XPS launches (still get license error) then loads perfectly fine showing me the full design I can then edit.

It just point blank refuses to work on Windows 7. The Project still reports the Part as No Part Found for the HDMI 7020 project, but it loads just fine and you can edit it.