We're happy to announce the release of an update for SP259 and SP259i Logic Analyzer firmware. This update can be applied to any existing device: you simply need to update ScanaStudio Software to its latest version. In this post, we'll dive into the specifics of that update and the challenges behind it.
We’ll be focusing on Spartan FPGA devices, hence we’ll use one of the tools that are compatible with this devices family. It’s not the most recent family of FPGAs from Xilinx, but it’s a good starting point because it’s highly documented (both on official and unofficial channels), and by far one of the most famous FPGA families out there. It’s also one of the less expansive.
In Part 1 we have explained what are FPGAs and how they are different from micro-controllers. In this second part, we're going to dig deeper into the world of FPGAs and discuss some of the most important aspects that you need to understand in order to get started.
Before wasting too much of your precious time I’ll reply - straight forward - to those 3 questions:
This series of articles aims at helping you through the - sometimes painful - transition from the world of embedded programming (normal sequential programming like C, Javascript or basic) into the world of FPGA and VHDL programming (VHDL is a language used to program FPGA). It’s a journey I’ve been through some years ago, and although there are many articles out there, the subject is so hard to grasp sometimes that I thought one more article on the subject wouldn't harm. This document only talks about things encountered and tested with Xilinx Spartan family of FPGAs using VHDL programming language, but the principles remain the same for other product families or other manufacturers. Hopefully, we'll dedicate another article in the future for Lattice FPGAs and their Diamond development environment.
We wanted to do this for a long time, and now it's finally ready: ScanaStudio 5.0 (Still in beta at the time of writing that document) let you plot decoded data on a graph, giving much more meanigful visualization of physical quantities likes Speed, Temperature, or Acceleration.