openCologne and birth of new ULX (ULX5M)

About me

Goran

 

Repair technician of informatics equipment

Repair technician of banking equipment

SW/HW design engineer (LoRa, NB-IoT, FPGA...)

Member of Radiona.org – Zagreb Makerspace

Meetups, lectures, workshops, exibitions...

CEO and co-founder of Intergalaktik d.o.o.

About RadionaOrg

Radiona.org is a non-profit organisation and citizen lab consisting of makerspace/hackerspace, media art lab, Repair Café and residence program founded in 2011. The organisation is dealing with DIY (do-it-yourself), DIWO (do-it-with-others) and DITO (do-it-together) cultures, STEAM concepts, interdisciplinary and intergenerational non-formal education and hybrid activities.

 

It is a diverse and intergenerational community of different professions working together.

Intergalaktik d.o.o.

Founded in 2020.
Organize crowdfunding campaign for ULX3S
Taking care of ULX3S production
ULX3S distribution
ULX3S support gitter/discord/mail

Focused on opensource HW/SW solutions

Currently working on multiple open projects

(SynthoGame, FireFly, ULX4M, ULX3S extension boards, STM32-ULX3S, Megaphone, ULX3S-BB3)

 

https://intergalaktik.eu/

https://twitter.com/intergalaktikEU

GateMate™ FPGA Evaluation Board

Community boards with GateMateA1

Before project started

-  there are no examples that runs on board

- on project start there was only Gwenhael demos

https://github.com/trabucayre/GateMate_demos

and official blink LED project

 

- FPGA toolchain was partially proprietary (p_r)

 

- missing HW peripherals that are ready to use

Since 1997 NLnet foundation (after its historical contribution to the early internet in Europe) has been financially supporting organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It funds those with ideas to fix the internet. The procedure is fast, competitive and open to anyone. The articles of association for the NLnet foundation state: "to promote the exchange of electronic information and all that is related or beneficial to that purpose".

NLnet has contributed funding to many important and very visible projects around fundamental standards from securing the core routing protocols and the domain name system of the internet to safer email, vendor-independent videoconferencing, more reliable wireless networks and private instant messaging - all based on open standards and verifiable open source software and/or hardware. It spawned the world-renowned NLnet Labs, and supported great open source projects like Jitsi, ARPA2, WireGuard, NoScript, Tor Hidden Services, GPLv3, GNUnet, and webODF. And many more ....

openCologne

ChiliChips.Ba

 

This project was done in collaboration with Chili Chips*Ba team.
They have put enormous effort in making all cores to work on GateMate even before we have our own board!
Thanks to them now we have big set of cores that can be used to check and improve opensource toolchain!
They are proven to be reliable partners that solves problem quickly and on side works on educating younger generations!

 

https://www.chili-chips.xyz/

Tasks and Milestones

Olimex - GateMateA1-EVB

50€

Extending Olimex - GateMateA1-EVB

Laser cuted paper stencils

Assembled extensions

Porting ULX3S (ECP5) examples - done by ChiliChips.Ba

Getting extensions running

We all love colors!!!

TetriSaraj

Most of things confirmed - lets make more HW!

  • Interfaces

    • 8 LEDs ( 8 )
    • 3 BTNs ( 3 )
    • SD Card (4 data lines)
    • RPi 26 GPIO + 2 I2C GPIOs ( 14 diff pairs)
    • DDMI0 ( 3 diff data lines + diff clock )
    • LVDS0 ( 4 diff data lines + diff clock )
    • LVDS1 ( 3 diff data lines + diff clock )
    • USB-C ( 1 diff data line + USBID )
    • PCIe ( 2 diff data lines + diff clock )
    • SDRAM
    • Gigabit Ethernet
    • FLASH
  • ext. clock: 100 MHz lvds
  • ext. clock: 25MHz
  • programmer interface
  • usb-c connector
  • select between flash and jtag config

Raspberry PI CM4/CM5 compatible pinout

Routing - 6 layer board

ULX5M-GS

ULX5M-GS bring up!

Messy but works!!!

Moar samples!!! by Micko

  • Tested and confirmed working ov V002 ( with patches )

  • LEDs

  • BTNs - work on v002 but better use v003

  • Video output ( DVI )

  • GPIO output

  • USB-C TinyDFU USB Bootloader

  • Serial Over GPIO

  • VGA Over GPIO

  • JTAG

  • LVDS - rapicam*

  • DIP SW - they work as FLASH BOOT SELECT

  • FLASH - I can put bitstream in flash and boot from flash

  • SDRAM - tested with LiteX works from v002

  • SD - tested with LiteX works from v002

  • Ethernet - not tested - needs V003

  • PCIe - not tested

Current status - ULX5M-GS-v003

What is next - PCIe

Additional thank you notes

Big thanks goes to YosysHQ as they are doing miracles with open source tooling, and we now finally have one that works for GateMate!

From YosysHQ special thanks to Micko and Lofty that are helping in real time on Discord!

Special thanks to Patrick from Cologne, as without him and rest of Cologne team we would not be able to get this project done.

Big thanks to Gwenhael Goavec-Merou  (trabucayre) author of openFPGALoader

Thanks to Olimex - for making great opensource boards

Kicad

pcb2blender

other opensource tools

community on discord and wider

Thank you and join us in lobby!

 

https://github.com/intergalaktik/ulx5m-gs

https://intergalaktik.eu/news

https://radiona.org/

 

https://discord.gg/qwMUk6W

https://slides.com/goranmahovlic

https://www.chili-chips.xyz/open-cologne/

https://colognechip.com/programmable-logic/gatemate/

 

openCologne and birth of new ULX (ULX5M)

By Goran Mahovlić

openCologne and birth of new ULX (ULX5M)

openCologne and birth of new ULX (ULX5M)

  • 184