Hi, different people at different ages have different meaning of FUN. Too my very surprise Xilinx Spartan3e Sample Pack has been proved itself to be fun for my younger son who is 3.5 years old and for myself. The Sample Pack comes with 2 designs loaded, first the running LEDs starts, on push of the button Dice game is loaded using the Multi Boot Feature. So while I was working with the board my son did come to look what I am doing, and he played with the board pretty long time showing real interest in it. I had the secondary design image in the top flash erased so each time my son triggered multi boot I had to reconfigure the FPGA manually with either the running LEDs or Dice game. I was doing it with Sample Pack standaalone utility that displays the LED status on screen in near realtime. So I explained to my son that the LEDs on the board are also displayed on screen so we pushed in turns and then looked to monitor to see the number of the Dice game. Also it was amazing to see how my son tried to figure it out, following the power supply cables from the board, then the JTAG cable from board to Cable IV and then to the PC. Like trying to follow the electrons without really knowing that. All this play did keep my son interested way beyound I would have expected. Actually I got tired before he did. So even if that Rotating LEDs + Dice game looked a bit silly for me at the first look, it is not so bad choice, at least those of us with kids may find that the Sample Pack entertainment level is pretty good. Now, lets see what fun has the board provided for me. First I did burn the board in with cheap power supply and had to replace the switching supply and the StrataFlash on the board. That wasnt fun. After that the board seemed to work. At least the running LED and Dice did work ok. But in the matter of fact the FPGA was damaged as well. After figuring it out that the FPGA fabric is really faulty Iimpact verify says 460000 bits out of 560000 have verify errors !!! I was able to rewrite my RTL code to be more fault tolerant and after that it works. So I fixed an faulty FPGA to work by re-implemnting a design. Doing that was FUN for me. I hope that Spartan3e can provide some fun times for all ages and levels of expertize. -- The faulty FPGA on my board doesnt mean that the Spartan3E are bad, actually it shows that FPGAs are very good and useable even on an board where almost all other silicon was severly damaged due to power surge. The FPGA survived at least partially and is still at least partially useable. -- Antti Lukats http://www.xilant.com
Xilinx Spartan3E Sample Pack: Real fun for all Ages!
Started by ●January 3, 2006
Reply by ●January 3, 20062006-01-03
Unfortunately we in europe are not able to play with the kit... I assume guys at Xilinx think there are not enough potential customers there :-((
Reply by ●January 3, 20062006-01-03
"Ralph" <ralphw69@gmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:ee93669.0@webx.sUN8CHnE...> Unfortunately we in europe are not able to play with the kit... > > I assume guys at Xilinx think there are not enough potential customers > there :-((Well give them a few days, the new year has just begun, I feel hard to belive that the Sample Pack boards will not be available in Europe at all. So wait for the next week and starting asking your distributor and FAE if they can arrange the Sample Pack for you. Antti
Reply by ●January 3, 20062006-01-03
Antti, We made a whole bunch of them. I know because the Spartan folks were all excited and running around giving them to selected folks here in San Jose. I expect it is like the snake swallowing the elephant: there is a big bump of boards working their way through the system! As an aside, I had my 15 month old twin grandchildren from Scottsdale over for the Christmas holidays (with their parents). The twins certainly were too young for the Spartan 3E sample pack, but they were fascinated with anything with blinking lights, sounds, and buttons. In fact the little boy (they are fraternal twins), was 'helping' me conduct an emergency services net during the height of the downpours we had (I volunteer for Santa Cruz County ARES, which supports the Red Cross, County Sheriff, and County OES). He sat with me as I kept track of things over the radios... Oh, and they liked chasing the cats. Austin Antti Lukats wrote:> "Ralph" <ralphw69@gmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag > news:ee93669.0@webx.sUN8CHnE... > >>Unfortunately we in europe are not able to play with the kit... >> >>I assume guys at Xilinx think there are not enough potential customers >>there :-(( > > > Well give them a few days, the new year has just begun, I feel hard to > belive that the Sample Pack > boards will not be available in Europe at all. So wait for the next week and > starting asking your > distributor and FAE if they can arrange the Sample Pack for you. > > Antti > >
Reply by ●January 4, 20062006-01-04
Now, is it this: http://www.avnet.com/img_shared/evk/df2df2usa/Spartan-3E-Starter-Kit.gif what we have been waiting for like a moon rising? This I found with a little "URL hacking" from avnet's site at: http://www.em.avnet.com/evk/home/0,1719,RID%253D0%2526CID%253D27812%2526CCD%253DUSA%2526SID%253D4742%2526DID%253DDF2%2526SRT%253D1%2526LID%253D18806%2526PVW%253D%2526BID%253DDF2%2526CTP%253DEVK,00.html (If above URL falls in pieces, the same page can be found from the list http://www.fpga-faq.org/FPGA_Boards.shtml by searching for SPAR3E) But I wonder, is this really exactly the same board as what Xilinx will sell: http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xebiz/designResources/ip_product_details.jsp?key=HW-SPAR3E-DK (the page is now saying that Spartan-3E Starter Kit available February, 2006 !) Note that in the advertisement photo at Xilinx site, they still use the photo of the old Spartan-3 (DO-SPAR3-DK) Starter Kit. (So I had presumed all the time, that the new Spartan-3E Starter Kit would also be manufactured by Digilent, but apparently it's not so...) Yours, Veli Igor
Reply by ●January 4, 20062006-01-04
<veligor@gmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:1136401988.584558.129590@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...> Now, is it this: > http://www.avnet.com/img_shared/evk/df2df2usa/Spartan-3E-Starter-Kit.gif > what we have been waiting for like a moon rising? >yes this is it I think its first time that Avnet is selling Digilent boards and not their own ! (they have S3e-100 boards of their own making) this is the digilent board aka Spartan 3E starterkit, notice that Avnet says lead time 5 weeks what is february also Antti
Reply by ●January 4, 20062006-01-04
Xilinx does not discriminate against Europe. It was the other way around: I used a friend who flew home to Germany for Xmas, to hand-carry a kit, and mail it locally to Antti. So Antti got the first kit outside the US. We cannot do that for everybody in Europe. Maybe it was "the squeaky wheel gets the grease..." In the meantime, we are mailing Antti another board, since we don't want him to be a complaining repairman... Peter Alfke Ralph wrote:> Unfortunately we in europe are not able to play with the kit... > > I assume guys at Xilinx think there are not enough potential customers there :-((
Reply by ●January 4, 20062006-01-04
"Peter Alfke" <peter@xilinx.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:1136404826.510529.30510@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...> Xilinx does not discriminate against Europe. > It was the other way around: > I used a friend who flew home to Germany for Xmas, to hand-carry a kit, > and mail it locally to Antti. > So Antti got the first kit outside the US. > We cannot do that for everybody in Europe. Maybe it was "the squeaky > wheel gets the grease..." > In the meantime, we are mailing Antti another board, since we don't > want him to be a complaining repairman... > Peter Alfke >Ouch - I did not want to complain so much actually, I was just eager to get some things tested, and when the power supply surge did burn everything, so I tried to repair as much as could - and I am now actually able to use the board again to some degree. Spartan3e was pretty much the only silicon device on my burnt board that retained some useability, everything else was totally dead - this should be taken as very good destructive test of the Spartan3e silicon. So I am not complaining about the need of repair, things happen - actually similar power supply has damaged here several other boards - so it was defenetly not the fault of the board or useage. Anyway I had and still have fun with Spartan3e and even havent checked all the new features yet. And I hope that my bad-luck at the beginning of my Sample Pack testing actually brings something useful out of it at least I was forced todo lots of more testing then I would otherwise done. As of US vs Europe, well at first the Distributors provided the "Free" special but later on it turned out that those are only valid in the north america and asia/pacific, this was kind of surprising, but OTOH maybe those specials at those disti sites were ahead of time, as well Xilinx website has still no Sample Pack info (or almost none). I just collected the public info and provided that, somewhat assuming there will be (some)EU supply also. More to the Europa - it looks like nahitafu in Japan got his S3e sample pack a day or two before I did (or maybe even earlier) Peter, I just (1 minute ago) received confirmation that first beta test person testing the Sample Pack standalone programming utility was actually able to use the tool and to reprogram the flash on his board - I keep working on and hope to get the tool soon available for public release. Antti
Reply by ●January 5, 20062006-01-05
Hi Peter, that wasn't meant to be unpolite... But why wouldn't you send a bunch of them to AVNET EU so that they could distribute them to their customers? or shall we all squeak? ;-) Ralph
Reply by ●January 5, 20062006-01-05
Ralph, Xilinx has a Marketing and a Sales organization whose job it is to distribute and sell our products. I have neither the inclination nor the authority to create a parallel bootleg operation. I do occasionally help a personal friend, especially when I know that he will use it immediately and intensely. Very intensely. Have a happy and prosperous New Year ! Peter
