Battling new fpga card toolchain and building PC side program for first SAC interface debugging

Another very long day with not much free time.

SAC INTERFACE FOR ADDING PERIPHERALS TO THE 1130

Just cleaning up logic and starting in on the PC side quickie program to display the status of all the signals being detected from the 1131 processor over the SAC cable. Hoping to have the signals reflected to the PC by sometime today, when I can fire up a test of the interface and do some debugging.

The toolchain was quite a pain - installing JDK, SDCC, MinGW, the ZTEX toolkit and other parts all independent and most only lightly documented. Finally stitched it all together and loaded my firmware on the fpga board's USB module. Next up, I loaded the Spartan 6 bit file to the board EEPROM.

I then whipped up a quick program using wxPython and PyUSB to receive the stream of signals I am transmitting and display them on a very simple GUI. It is not debugged enough to run with the 1130 powered up yet, but getting close to a first power on test.