Monday, September 5, 2022

RAM access working, but slightly erratic operation of the link still needs some debugging

SHORT SESSION SQUEEZED IN USING NEW DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS

I was able to spot an issue, correct it with only a 30 minute turnaround for a new bitfile for the FPGA. I began to see that most of the returned words on the Unload transaction were what I had written previously with the Load transaction. This shows I am indeed writing to and reading from RAM addresses. 

I did see that the results were mostly correct - the value returned should be the word number which is what I wrote, but some came back incorrect. Worse, I would see the checksum and flag coming back from the FPGA while the Arduino still thought it hadn't finished all 321 words of data. Things are getting out of sync. 

Since it will be a day before I can get back to the shop, I will look over the logic and see where I can tighten up the operation of the state machines to keep everything locked properly together. 

The other thing I haven't yet validated is that the address I am sending is going to the correct RAM locations. I need to know that a read or write to a particular cylinder, head and sector will take place against the correct part of the disk cartridge image. 

No comments:

Post a Comment