Re: [Fx2lib-devel] Allmybrain.com Question/Comment: interested in fx2 cystream

[Chris M. <ch...@ma...>]

Hey Nu,

I made my own board for connecting an FX2LP to a Xilinx FPGA if you're
interested: http://www.makestuff.eu/wordpress/?page_id=446

The Eagle design files, some firmware and VHDL are there if you want
them.

- Chris


On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 14:31 -0600, Dennis Muhlestein wrote:
> Nu Tiu wrote:
> > Hello Dennis,
> >
> > Thanks a lot for a very quick response.  I have a couple more
> > questions, and if you could help me, I'd really appreciate it.
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 2:19 AM, Dennis Muhlestein <de...@ub...> wrote:
> >   
> >> Hi Nu,
> >>
> >> The only additional hardware you'll need is whatever peripheral device you
> >> might wish to connect.
> >> The Cypress dev kit has all the IO pins exposed and
> >> comes with a bread-board adapter for plugging in your own stuff (albeit most
> >> modern parts are too complex to use with their bread-board).  Are you
> >> planning on doing your experiments with only the FX2?
> >>     
> >
> > I will be connecting it with a Xilinx FPGA.
> >   
> 
> You'll most likely have to spin a custom PCB to hook an FPGA to the 
> Cypress devel board.  I don't know of anyone that sells one.  Perhaps 
> someone else on the list has done it.  We also use Xilinx FPGAs and we 
> spun our own board with an FX2 and an FPGA.  OpalKelly sells boards with 
> an FX2/FPGA but they don't support ISO endpoints and they don't give the 
> source for their firmware for you to customize.
> 
> >   
> >> The Cypress kit comes with a Keil compiler sample and only works on Windows.
> >>  That works for a bit, but you'll quickly run into their 4k firmware size
> >> limit as you start putting logic into your firmware.  You can use the fx2lib
> >> library and SDCC for the compiler if you would rather stick to Open/Free
> >> software.  Fx2lib supports a good portion (if not all) of the library
> >> features that Cypress provides for Keil.  You can join the fx2lib mailing
> >> list here if you like:
> >>
> >> http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=247216
> >>     
> >
> > I have signed up for the mailing list already. :-)
> >   
> Great!  I have copied the list on these last couple emails so perhaps 
> someone else that has done this might input if they like.
> >   
> >> As a side note, there are other development boards on the market that are
> >> cheaper than the Cypress dev kit.
> >>     
> >
> > Thanks.  Just a bit deeper digging shows boards from
> > http://www.acquiredevices.com/products.jsp
> > They sell Cypress EZ-USB FX2 board for about US$70, which is more
> > reasonable than Cypress's $400+.
> >
> > Would Cypress/Keil/SDCC tool work on alternative(cheaper) board?  I
> > mean, suppose I have Keil tools, can I write C code, compile, download
> > it to Cypress and see it communicating back to Cypress software?
> >   
> 
> You can use any Keil/SDCC for any board with an FX2 part.  As long as it 
> is an FX2 chip, you can always load your own firmware on the device.  A 
> word of caution though, if you don't know the board schematic it can 
> take quite a while to get a custom firmware working on a device.  Xilinx 
> FPGAs for instance have 4 or 5 different programming modes.  You have to 
> know which pins are the mode pins that tell it which mode to program in, 
> and then you have to know which pins to send the data to the FPGA on.
> 
> > Here is what I plan to do for my project:
> > 1. design a USB audio sound module which plays sound only (so data
> > only flows out from host(PC) to USB device)
> > 2. set up the cypress chip to be a USB audio class device using
> >     - isochronous audio data transfer from host
> >     - use asynchronous mode isochronous data transfer
> >     - program cypress to provide rate feedback for the isochronous data link
> > 3. the data out from Cypress chip goes through FPGA which will perform
> > digital filtering.
> > 4. data from FPGA out will go through DAC and then to speakers/headphones.
> >
> > I hope cypress 68013a would be powerful enough to solve this problem.
> > It doesn't look that hard, but although I know both C for software and
> > Verilog for FPGA design, I am a newbie at embedded programming.
> >   
> The Fx2 is great at streaming data from the FPGA to the PC.  We are 
> currently doing it at 43 Mbps with the slave fifo interface.  I've done 
> it up to about 33 Mbps with a GPIF.
> 
> > If you have more advice/pointer regarding whether I picked the right
> > device to do USB interface, I would really appreciate it.
> >   
> I'm not an expert in alternatives but I'm sure there are other ways to 
> do it.  The FX2 is a pretty common usb controller.  I think many people 
> that don't use the FX2 probably use their own custom chip.
> > A quick glance through Cypress's dev board shows that they provide
> > access for the device pins and they have the following:
> >
> > - a PLD chip (GAL22LV10C) -- don't know what they program this thing
> > for (but the code looks very simple)
> > - an 128k - 8 bit SRAM (CY7C1019BV33) -- would this be necessary?
> > - an RS232 transceiver -- i don't think I need it
> > - some I2C IO expander -- i don't think i need it
> >
> > So, I just wonder in what scenario would I need an SRAM?
> >   
> The dev board provides most of the chips that the fx2 can directly 
> utilize.  You don't necessarily need them on a custom PCB.  You can 
> store data in an sram for instance, to give more memory to the FX2.  I 
> haven't actually used this.  My firmwares to date has all fit in the 16K 
> FX2 ram.
> 
> -Dennis
> 
> 
> 
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