On 12/19/2016 6:10 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Hi, > when we are talking about FPGA cards and closing servo loops in them, is it > possible to use this SoC board as a Mesa I/O card7I80DB? So as to connect it > by > ethernet to i386 PC Machinekit controller. > > I have been thinking about FPGA combo (back then PCI based) for long time but > was completely turned off Mesa by how they conduct business and unfortunately > these is no viable competition. > > I know that I would still have to solve somehow the 7i77 side but that's for > another day.
I suppose it would be possible to turn one of the SoC+FPGA boards into a 7I80DB clone, but it wouldn't be easy. The 7I80 FPGA logic is open source, but it uses a custom CPU built from FPGA gates for the IP stack, and it expects to talk to the specific embedded Ethernet controller chip used on the Mesa board. Worse, the Ethernet ports on all the SoC+FPGA dev kit boards I am aware of are tied to the ARM processor side, not the FPGA fabric, so you would have a difficult time getting the 7I80 code running. You would also pretty much be throwing away the entire ARM side of the SoC+FPGA board. You'd probably be better off starting with a more traditional FPGA only dev. kit if you're wanting to mimic one of the Mesa Ethernet cards. -- Charles Steinkuehler [email protected] -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/machinekit. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
