3 ms·

Icestudio: Drag and Drop FPGA programming and learning

69 points by harvie 4y ago

harvie 4y ago
Visual programming and learning with great building blocks recursively built using simpler blocks while being well documented.
boesboes 4y ago
Seems to be pretty much abandoned? It seems the nightly builds can not be downloaded any more atleast. Might just be a temp issue of course.
- dr_zoidberg 4y ago
  It's got commits from 2 months ago, I keep a few projects that go a few months at a time without activity. I wouldn't say it's abandoned, though maybe the devs aren't finding the time for it (or they're preparing some big update that isn't quite ready yet).
- harvie 4y ago
  No it's not. Maybe the development is bit slow, because it's not funded by big players. Didn't tried nightly builds, but there is some prerelease available: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/releases https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/releases
guenthert 4y ago
Looks interesting, but which FPGA chips and boards are actually supported?
- jnovek 4y ago
  Had to dig some but it ends up that it’s on the index page of the docs. https://icestudio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://icestudio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
  - harvie 4y ago
    In fact these docs are out of date and now even more boards are supported. You can find the list directly in icestudio menu. If you want to check it beforehand without installing icestudio, i think it's possible to see the list here in source code: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/tree/develop/app/resources/boards https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/tree/develop/app/resou...
- iron2disulfide 4y ago
  Based purely on the name and a super quick scroll through the github page, it's probably the Lattice ice-series of chips, even more probably the ice40. There are a couple boards with ice40 chips out there that you can use fully OSS tooling for from synthesis to PnR to programming.
- harvie 4y ago
  There is list of supported boards in menu. "Ice" in Icestudio was originaly for (Latt)ICE or ICE(40) i guess. But since the F4PGA (formerly known as Symbiflow) is opensource project used to abstract away various FPGA makes (just like gcc and llvm support different CPU architectures). It is quite possible to support more than that. For example right now there is guy working on integrating Apicula project to add support for Gowin FPGA based boards which are extremely cheap: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/issues/645 https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/issues/645

69 points by harvie 4y ago

Visual programming and learning with great building blocks recursively built using simpler blocks while being well documented.

boesboes 4y ago

Seems to be pretty much abandoned? It seems the nightly builds can not be downloaded any more atleast. Might just be a temp issue of course.

dr_zoidberg 4y ago
It's got commits from 2 months ago, I keep a few projects that go a few months at a time without activity. I wouldn't say it's abandoned, though maybe the devs aren't finding the time for it (or they're preparing some big update that isn't quite ready yet).
harvie 4y ago
No it's not. Maybe the development is bit slow, because it's not funded by big players. Didn't tried nightly builds, but there is some prerelease available: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/releases https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/releases

guenthert 4y ago

Looks interesting, but which FPGA chips and boards are actually supported?

jnovek 4y ago
Had to dig some but it ends up that it’s on the index page of the docs. https://icestudio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://icestudio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- harvie 4y ago
  In fact these docs are out of date and now even more boards are supported. You can find the list directly in icestudio menu. If you want to check it beforehand without installing icestudio, i think it's possible to see the list here in source code: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/tree/develop/app/resources/boards https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/tree/develop/app/resou...
iron2disulfide 4y ago
Based purely on the name and a super quick scroll through the github page, it's probably the Lattice ice-series of chips, even more probably the ice40. There are a couple boards with ice40 chips out there that you can use fully OSS tooling for from synthesis to PnR to programming.
harvie 4y ago
There is list of supported boards in menu. "Ice" in Icestudio was originaly for (Latt)ICE or ICE(40) i guess. But since the F4PGA (formerly known as Symbiflow) is opensource project used to abstract away various FPGA makes (just like gcc and llvm support different CPU architectures). It is quite possible to support more than that. For example right now there is guy working on integrating Apicula project to add support for Gowin FPGA based boards which are extremely cheap: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/issues/645 https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio/issues/645