Documentation

I plan to write some more prose-like on the architecture of midgetv, For now, here is a short description of how to program blinky to an iceboard40-hx1k.

First time programming in "13 easy steps"

To program blinky we need to:

• assemble blinky.S to blinky.bin
• transform blinky.bin to a format that can be included easily in Verilog, the result file is ice40loaderprog.hv, a file containing localparam. This is done by an utility midgetv_bin2ebr.
• Compile the Verilog code, and
• Upload the Verilog code.

When this is the very first time any instance of midgetv is compiled, there are some additional steps. Midgetv depends on microcode, the file ucode.h must be transformed to Verilog. This is done by an utility midgetv_indirectEBR. That utility must itself be compiled. Also, the utility midgetv_bin2ebr mentioned above must be compiled. Performing these steps linearly may look like this:

1. Assume you have downloaded midgetv-x.y.z. Assume you have downloaded a riscv gcc, and programming tools for iceboard40-hx1k.
2. tar -xzf midgetv-2.0.1.tar.gz (unpack)
3. cd midgetv-2.0.1/code
4. make
   (This produces a Verilog file ../obj_dir/m_2ebr.v)
5. cd ../util/
6. make
   (This produces the utility ../bin/midgetv_bin2ebr)
7. mkdir ../obj_dir/first
   (I need to enhance my make file. This directory must be made by hand now)
8. cd ../sw/hwexamples/blinky/
9. make
   (This produces a verilog include file ../../../hwtst/iceblink40-hx1k/ice40loaderprog.hv)
10. cd ../../../hwtst/iceblink40-hx1k/
11. apio clean
12. apio build (Compile the Verilog code)
13. apio upload