Program Fipsy FPGA Breakout Board from ESP32

[yoursunny]

The official method to program the Fipsy is through the SPI port on a Raspberry Pi. It is easy to setup, and is a good use case for my Raspberry Pi Zero W, but there is one problem: It is good practice to power off the circuit when modifying hardware wiring. However, powering off a Raspberry Pi cleanly requires sending a shutdown command and waiting for a few seconds.

So I deciphered the spaghetti code in the official fipsyloader, and made esp-fipsy, a Fipsy programmer for the ESP32 microcontroller.

Read more at https://yoursunny.com/t/2018/esp-fipsy/.

[AlliedComponentWorks]

So I did look into this project with much enthusiasm – this is exactly what we hoped to see!  Porting to other platforms, other coding methods, and other general approaches will be critical to community success.  The best scenario will be a ready set of examples for as many potential users as possible.  Congratulations on building a completely new one so quickly!

I do want to make one counter point though.  The use of C++ is a great thing, and very helpful to people who think in that mode – and the code did seem well structured to me.   However, the characterization of the ‘official code’ might also be considered somewhat derogatory.  In fact, this was quite a significant effort and contribution on someone’s part.  Also please keep in mind its intended purpose – as an actually very simple program (coding 101), in ANSI C, and heavily commented, it is intended primarily to help others make derivative works fairly easily – we are thrilled to find it has done just that, and has done so more than once.

As a range of skills contribute their projects (from newbies as green as it gets to programming and FPGAs, all the way to highly skilled contributors as highlighted here), we want to see it all, encourage it all, and learn from it all.  One thing I have learned about this fully organic ‘maker’ environment (which is totally new to me), is that imperfection is an expected part of the process and needs to be embraced.   We have much to learn from both the shining examples and the struggles alike.  Coding, both in traditional programming and in FPGA code, seems to be one of those things that people all have very strong feelings about ‘how it should be done’.   New users will therefore also be drawn to some approaches more than others, requiring that we support as many as possible.  We should make them as easy to comprehend as we can and remain accepting and curious about multiple points of view.   For the most skilled among us, let’s take the opportunity to see how others learn, to learn a little ourselves, and to see how we can help.   Let’s encourage all and provide our own contributions from a point of view of any accumulated wisdom we may have, remembering what it was like when we were learning and what we wish people had told us.  Let’s make it fun for all!  I can’t wait for a true student to come up with something we never would have thought to do!

Thanks again for your interest and a great start!  I can hardly believe it!

 

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by AlliedComponentWorks.

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