ICEBlaster: A Drag’n’Drop Bitstream Loader For ICE40

The iCE40 sequence of FPGAs gets a reasonable bit of protection on these pages, mainly because of to its accessibility (thanks to large attempts in reverse engineering and open resource chains) and probable also thanks to Lattice Semiconductors’ perspective to open resource in normal. Although these devices are smaller and alternatively restricted, you can’t definitely conquer them for a 1st foray into the issue. They are plenty beefy enough for lots of of the simpler FPGA apps. [TinLethax] around on Hackaday.IO has a great deal of encounter with the products, and has extra yet another resource to our collective iCE40 arsenal, particularly iCEBlaster, a USB mass storage machine (MSC) design bootloader for drag-n-drop bitstream loading. The times of needing committed distinctive programmers are beginning to be numbered, with a lot of chips now presenting a USB mass storage device to the host in get to upload the firmware image.

FPGAs never tend to operate this way, needing a product-certain bitstream loading on commence-up, which (except they have OTP memory) is usually the job of an external configuration memory. iCEBlaster (a enjoy on the Xilinx ByteBlaster programmer, maybe?) runs on the STM32F4xx series devices at minimum, but really should be conveniently portable to other folks. The thought is really easy — dragging a new bitstream file on to the storage machine initiates an FPGA concentrate on reset, which in change lets the STM32 to deliver the bitstream around to the iCE40 by using the SPI interface. Nothing much more than that.

If you’ve been wanting to get into the iCE40, this guide might be a very good commencing point, and just about every understanding working experience wants a good project to travel it, how about jogging Doom on a softcore RISC-V?