Small demo video of Linux and ZPUino

A small demo video of Linux running inside ZPUino emulator:

Some small tech details:

Linux 3.4.0 (uclinux/Linux MMU-less) with uClibc 0.9.29 and busybox 1.20.2.
 
Alvie

Judge for yourselves

Hi guys, just leaving this here, so you can judge for yourselves what's going on:

console [ttySZ0] enabled, bootconsole disabled
ZPUINO: UART at 0x8800000, irq 1
brd: module loaded
loop: module loaded
Registering ZPUino SPI driver
ZPUino: probing for SPI controller
zpuino_spi zpuino_spi.0: master is unqueued, this is deprecated
zpuino_spi zpuino_spi.0: at 0x0A800000
ZPUino. SPI controller initialized 00281000
mousedev: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
mmc_spi spi0.0: SD/MMC host mmc0, no DMA, cd polling
Waiting for root device /dev/mmcblk0p1...
mmc_spi spi0.0: setup: unsupported mode bits 4
mmc_spi spi0.0: can't change chip-select polarity
mmc0: card lacks mandatory switch function, performance might suffer.
mmc0: new SDHC card on SPI
mmcblk0: mmc0:0000 SD    30.8 GiB 
 mmcblk0: p1
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly on device 179:1.
Freeing init memory: 64K (1000 - 11000)


BusyBox v1.20.2 (2012-10-17 09:44:15 WEST) hush - the humble shell

/ # uname -a
Linux (none) 3.4.0-uc0 #533 PREEMPT Wed Oct 17 19:04:33 WEST 2012 zpu GNU/Linux
/ #

Alvie

SoundPuddle, now also on KickStarter

Some of you might already heard of SoundPuddle. The SoundPuddle is an interactive space of visual-acoustic synesthesia. This spectrographically colorful dome creates color and light from sound, illuminating every noise you make on an immersive canopy of light. You will laugh, shout, and sing as thousands of solar powered LEDs unify your ears and eyes.

This unique art piece was first created for the Apogaea Festival -- a collaborative outdoor arts and music event that is held in the beautiful mountains of Colorado.Its primary structure is 24 foot (7.25m) wide dome - large enough to fit a band and their gear, yet small enough for a single person to play and explore. 

At SoundPuddle heart is a Papilio One 500 FPGA, running ZPUino and performing real-time signal analysis, using 10 SPI controllers to handle the almost 1700 RGB led present. All this was possible due to close collaboration between John English, the project head, Jack Gassett, from Gadget Factory, and myself. The display at Apogaea was very successful, and a lot of positive feedback was received.

The project wants to grow, and for that it needs more funding. A Kickstarter project just started for this same reason:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1464351351/soundpuddle/

You can find general information about the project at the http://www.soundpuddle.org website.

Again, a fantastic project, based on ZPUino, and with a lot of room for improvements! If you like the project, consider donating - we never know if SoundPuddle will someday be near you, so you can enjoy it too.

Alvie

UPDATE: check also the Photo Stream!.. Some nice stuff there to see.

RetrocadeSynth project - now on Kickstarter

A new ZPUino-based project on Kickstarter !

The RetroCade Synth boasts the capability to play the built-in Commodore 64 SID chip, the Yamaha YM-2149 chip, .mod files, and MIDI files - all at the same time! The RetroCade Synth can be played via any external MIDI control interface or via your favorite audio/ sequencing software. We have built a custom VST software dashboard which gives you visual control over all the various parameters the synth has to offer.

An excellent initiative from Gadget Factory. Go and support Open Source Hardware!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13588168/retrocade-synth-one-chiptune-board-to-rule-them-al

Alvie

1.0.1 slightly delayed

Hi,

just to let you know that 1.0.1 release is slightly delayed - It was scheduled for May 13th, but due to a few (non-technical) reasons it's now due on May 15th.

This is what is expected:

• The multiplier and shifter are now merged together. Smaller implementation.
• Added a new ZPU instruction, FMUL16, opcode (01h), which performs a fixed-point 16:16 multiplication. Useful for FFT and other math computations.
• Multiplier is now signed instead of unsigned
• SPI controller is now able to do 16, 24 and 32-bit transfers
• UART now has a bit depicting if all transmission has ended. Needed to fix a bug when your sketch changed baudrate and it was still transmitting.
• Updated UARTSTATUS register index on IDE
• IDE now reports a better size for sketches, including program and code size.
• Removed misinclusion of <new> in some headers
• IDE can now build and include asssembly (.S) files in the sketch folder
• SPI interface is now directly connected on most boards, so to speed up sampling.
• Added new board (Papilio One 250 with extra 2Kb RAM). All P1 250 are compatible.
• SmallFS was updated to use the new SPI multibyte transfer sizes.
• A new HDL core: a 16:16 fixed point square root IP

As always, expecting your feedback.

Alvie

New ZPUino cores available

A few new ZPUino cores are now available. These are variants of the main design, and can be found on the "variants" folder of the relevant board. Additionaly you can find there the prebuild bitfiles and some documentation, inside the "release/latest" subfolders.

New cores are:

P1 500 "Apollo" variant:
- Includes an YM2149 audio synthesizer

P1 500 "sid" variant:
- Includes an SID audio synthesizer

P1 250 "Apollo" variant:
- Includes an YM2149 audio synthesizer, and an extra serial port.

Other cores to follow in the next few days.

Alvie

HDL Repository has moved

Due to some recent issues with repo.or.gz, I moved the HDL repository into github.

https://github.com/alvieboy/ZPUino-HDL.

To change your current checkout, do:

git remote add github git://github.com/alvieboy/ZPUino-HDL.git
git fetch github
git branch --set-upstream master remotes/github/master

All should work, I hope.

Alvie