<trabucayre>
pepijndevos: to use your rpi for flashing an FPGA it's now possible to use netcat :-)
<disasm[m]>
trabucayre: does it use USB CDC for communication?
<disasm[m]>
I also thought about something like this for flashing iCE40 with compressed bitstreams (which ice40 don't support): just stream a compressed bitstream into a programmer, the programmer decompresses it on the fly and programs the FPGA/SPI flash
<trabucayre>
in my case it's a just support of '|' (ie a read for stdin)
<trabucayre>
I have a github issue to support a gzip compressed bitstream.
<disasm[m]>
Oh, apparently, you're talking about regular rpi, not pico
<trabucayre>
yep. I've forget everyone is focused to the pico
<trabucayre>
:)
<disasm[m]>
<trabucayre "I have a github issue to support"> My idea was to improve performance for slow JTAG interfaces. For example, Colorlight i5 board has a CMSIS-DAP JTAG probe, which is extremely slow. If you feed a compressed bitstream instead of a regular one, you can cut programming time in half, for example.
<disasm[m]>
Same thing for ULX3S. Luckily, ECP5 supports compressed bitstreams out of the box.
<trabucayre>
yep
<trabucayre>
I've added the colorlight i5 in my order list :)
<trabucayre>
for ULX3S the ft232R is a problem :-/
<trabucayre>
bitbanging is always slow
<disasm[m]>
Maybe one day I write a damn fast firmware for that colorlight programmer chip.
<disasm[m]>
IIRC I achieved 10MHz JTAG bitbang speed on STM32F103
<trabucayre>
it's a thing I need to improve for openFPGALoader. By default it use 6MHz freq
<trabucayre>
I must to configure freq to fit max allowed speed for the target FPGA
<disasm[m]>
I investigated this problem for iceprog which also uses 6MHz iirc. The main issue was synchronous USB access which limits the overall speed by a great amount.
<disasm[m]>
For iceprog you can't do better if you just change the frequency to 24MHz. Nothing changes, really.
<trabucayre>
with openFPGALoader you need to use --freq to configure freq
<trabucayre>
the only device where the freq is changed is gowin -> 2.5MHz
<trabucayre>
for i5 I need something to plug the board :)