Stormwyrm: 蛟龍

I’ve gradually begun setting up the Stormdeck to do simple electronics work. There is an Arduino 1.8 build for ARM64 that works well enough. I could potentially reprogram the Arduino Mini that is running the StormKB47 directly from the Deck that’s using it, though this is likely risky as I could lose my keyboard this way. I also got the CH32v003fun toolchain working. This is the easy stuff.

Next thing I tried was the Sipeed Tang Nano 9k FPGA. This proved to be the cheapest FPGA I could find and also the easiest to use and I’d been using it to learn Verilog. There turns out to be an ARM64 build of the OSS CAD Suite that runs fine on the Stormdeck, though it takes nearly ten minutes to build the FPGA video test I wrote which generates the SMTPE colour bars and other test patterns on a small 480×272 40-pin display. The Tang Nano 9k seems to be rather picky with USB ports and cables. It doesn’t like the USB hub I  have and plugging it in straight it into the second USB port it gets detected enough to be able to upload a synthesized bitstream but it malfunctions like it doesn’t get enough power. I switched the internal jumper to power the USB ports from the 5V supply rather than battery and that seems to have gotten it to work but it means that I can’t use USB at all unless the Deck is plugged in. That’s obviously no good. I’ll probably need to use a more expensive powered USB hub instead of the very cheap one I’m using now.