Altium Nanoboard 3000

I've managed to get my hands on a really cool FPGA board from Altium. It's very promising with a TFT touchscreen display, RS485, RS232, 3x USB 2.0, S/PDIF in-out, SD-card reader, headphones/line-in/line-out, 4-ch DAC, 4-ch ADC, 4x relays, PWM, SVGA output, MIDI and a TSK-3000A RISC 32-bit processor.

Unfortunately, where this technology is really amazing, getting things to work on your computer is not so. Your mind will dazzle from all the license files, registrations, threats about non-compliance with export restrictions and whatever else these companies come up with to make your life difficult. For someone having gotten used to Ubuntu and the software it brings through straight installs, getting a minimal "Hello World" out of this board is proving to be extremely challenging for a newbie. And I'm saying that as an experienced programmer.

The biggest crap factor are the Xilinx tools. They offer a "webpack", but the download is around 2.6GB (not much of a "webpack" if you ask me). The 12.1 version is incompatible with Altium Designer, so that's where problems are starting. So then I downloaded 11.1 as required, but that is not supported on Windows 7. Altium Designer so far has no particular problems with Windows 7. So I upgraded Altium Designer as much as possible, but that didn't improve the chances of compatibility with 12.1.

Basically, I got a dreaded "Xilinx ISE not found" message in red above my FPGA chip, which was actually due to a missing environment variable (no longer set in 12.1?). Altium Designer just picks up the "XILINX" path variable, which should point to the "ISE" subdirectory of the Xilinx ISE installation. If XILINX is not there, it will show the above message. Populating XILINX as the env variable by itself is not enough, as even a very simple example won't compile due to differences in compilation options.

If you get: "No Process Flow", then you should simple "configure" the project by right-clicking on the nanoboard icon in the devices view and generate the constraint files.

The information about what to do next is not really available on the Internet. Most suppliers lock down their forums entirely, so you need a login to find out if others have had the same problem. Since most companies probably follow the instructions on what OS to use and so on, this doesn't seem to have occurred much. Luckily, I found one solution that seems to be going to work. You need a lot of patience and flick your common sense in "off mode" for this to work:

1. Download the ISE Webpack 11.1 anyway (2.6 GB or so).
   
2. Download the ISE Webpack 11.3 as well (another 2.7 GB..... *sigh*). Downloading only 11.3 will not work, because the installer asks for the 11.1 install directory (hooray!). Even though the size of the installation file clearly shows otherwise.
   
3. Then install 11.1, but not from the main folder. Go into "bin/nt" and start "xsetup.exe" from there.
4. Wait for this to install. Takes a while. Feel free to *not* install "webtalk", because that just sends how you use the tools to xilinx and why'd you want to do that?
   
5. Then install 11.3. It will ask for where you installed 11.1 to. 11.3 is luckily compatible with x64 already.
   
6. This upgrade takes quite some time (apparently it checks every file if it needs upgrading?).
   
7. Restart Altium Designer... and now it should show up. ( See "XILINX" environment variable if it doesn't ).

Another word on what these companies do that I find very strange. Altium Designer and Xilinx Webtalk basically monitor the way how you use the tools and send this over to their servers "for improving your experience". So you've got basically a hidden spy on your computer now that indicates to them what you use, how long you use it, on which days etc... ugh!

I'm certainly not some experienced FPGA designer, I just decided that I wanted to learn about this technology and play around with it. My intention is to grab a board that could do a number of interesting things, rather than starting from the bottom-level basics. Altium Designer allows me to focus on certain high-level topics, such that I can create some truly interesting marvels first before having to delve into the low-level details first. I prefer it that way, because I don't get hit by the low-level nit-picky details in the face immediately. Eventually however, I already noticed that one needs to gain the knowledge about electronics, wiring and so on in order to use these things effectively and knowledgeably.


My install got finished and it's all compiling now. I'm going to check through the tutorials, see if I can write a couple of things myself, play around with things a bit. Given the software that Altium provides, if you are a learner like me, I can certainly recommend what they are offering in these nanoboards...