Continuing from my hardware adventures last week, this week I played with some more FPGA stuff. In particular, I was super fed up with mucking around with the official tooling provided by the manufacturer to actually get my code onto the damn board. So, I made a small build tool that would allow me to work iteratively with a command-line based workflow against a simulator, and then just use a single command in the terminal to get it onto the hardware when I want to test there.

The project is called kaze, and is available on github as usual. "Kaze" (風) is the Japanese word for "wind", which I thought was an appropriate name for the project, as the goal was to make starting up and playing with hardware projects super quick and lightweight.

Thus far I haven't really done anything with it except for the pilot project, kaze-hello, which is basically the code I wrote for everyweeks last week, but with an added testbench and kaze project file. It certainly makes working with a small project like that more tolerable already, but I have no idea how it will scale.

I also have ideas for using the simulation stuff for some kind of TDD, and even a higher-level HDL, but I'll have to play with this stuff more to see if these are actually worthwhile ideas or not. Basically I consider this project total R&D; I have no idea if I'm solving a real problem here, but it's certainly fun to explore ways to improve my workflow. :)

Next, I hope to play with some more complicated signals (HDMI, for one) and see if there's any more fun stuff I can make using this tool!

Oh, and the screenshot comes from one of my favorite parts of Chrono Trigger, which is the greatest game of all time. Period. :D

Last Edited on Sun Nov 08 2015 03:07:06 GMT-0500 (EST)