Beta1 released

Hi,

I'm proud to announce that ZPUino Beta1 release is now available:

Release Notes
Download

Good hacking!

Alvie

A Sponsor Appreciation

Hi,

Beta 1 will be available later today, but I would not release it before a short sponsor appreciation, which is entirely justified.

So, I'd like to give a very special thank you to Gadget Factory, and to Jack Gassett himself. They have kindly provided to me all of their hardware boards for no cost, thus helping a lot ZPUino development (I need boards to test, to develop on, and new additional hardware too). That included Papilio One 250, Papilio One 500, and some early prototypes, like Papilio Overshield and C/RAM Wing and other in-production wings, like VGA, Audio and Joystick. Development goes way more smoother when we have real hardware to test stuff on.

Jack has also been a Beta tester for ZPUino, and he even put some demonstrations online, which I also thank him very much for the time spent (and pacience).

For all this, a huge Thank You to Gadget Factory and Jack.

Alvie

ZPUino BETA to be released

Yes, that's true!

ZPUino 1st BETA will be release hopefully during this weekend. I won't disclose all details until then, but here's a quick overview:

• Wishbone compatible. You can connect any wishbone-compliant core to the IO module


• Improved bootloader and programmer, with a lot of sanity checks.


• A new Papilio One core for S3E500, with HQVGA(160x120, 8-bit color) support


• A new S3ESK core, with a HQVGA 8-bit color (but reduced to 3-bit due to no board support)


• SmallFS - a simple-to-use, small filesystem on flash


• A new library: VGA, to work with the new cores


• Full (yes, full) Microsoft Windows Support (subject to testing, of course!)


• An optional preliminary IDE based on upcoming Arduino 1.0 release


• Lots of bugfixes all around

Stay tuned!.

Alvie

Win32 port

I'm happy to announce that all important ZPUino parts are now working in win32 (Windows XP).

The important parts are: IDE, compiler toolchain and programmer.

I'll release a beta version soon.

Alvie

Updated bitfile for Papilio One 500

Due to a miscalculation, the Alpha 4 image for Papilio One 500 would overwrite the FPGA bitfile when you uploaded a sketch, which in turn would cause it to require a new bitfile upload when power cycled. This is now fixed, and I published a new bitfile for it:

http://www.alvie.com/zpuino/download.html

Thanks a lot to the reporter and tester, "dack", who I spoke with on IRC on #gadgetfactory channel (FreeNode).

Alvie

Extreme

ZPUino extreme (the smallest version of it) successfully implemented and tested on FPGA. This core can do 1-cycle operations on many instructions, hence a lot faster than traditional cores. It also features a separate stack/memory, so memory is now mostly free and available for a DMA engine.

It might need a small redesign however, due to slowness of internal Block RAM. Despite timing things went very good. It still needs interrupt support, but should not be very intrusive.

Álvaro

ZPUino going wishbone

ZPUino is going wishbone, from the CPU core to the IO devices.

This will ease addition of new peripherals, like the ones in opencores.

Álvaro