Alchitry has recently relocated into significantly more space and some other project’s I’ve been working on (unrelated to Alchitry) have slowed. This means I now have more time and space to spend on Alchitry. With some of the new space, I’ll be setting up our film studio again (it got crowded out and is why there hasn’t been a video in a long time).
I’d love some feedback from the community on what you guys would like to see more of.
Focus Preference
Written Tutorials
Video Tutorials
Example Projects
Alchitry Labs Improvements
Elements (add-on boards)
FPGA Boards
Other (write a post)
0voters
As far as new elements go, here’s a list I’ve been thinking about.
I voted for the things I am the most looking after at this time, but I’m still interested with other things, like written tutorials and Labs evolutions.
I may be interested in MIPI and DACs/ADCs later as I gain experience because I guess these will required DRAM usage, which I didn’t tried yet.
As you maybe remember, I buit my own microphone array prototype using 5 PDM mics and I could get some audio but I didn’t digged that much yet. I would find tutorial about this pretty useful
As far as videos and focus I would like to see general tutorials and example projects for the tutorials. When I first got into FPGA programming I had 0 clue how to structure my code. Naive me tried to write an I2C communications module, but it was huge and messy and never worked. Now I wrote one that works in a day or two. Tutorials on how to guide newcomers to structuring their code with different examples would be great. Showing people how the code works and looks like in a proffesional, well designed HDL project would really improve their thinking. I am in the middle of writing up a universal wireless communication protocol with which I want wireless devices to interface with, and in the future I will probably facepalm at how terrible it is and have to redesign everything because I had little clue as to how a powerful, compact, and fast HDL program looked like. Still I think you should add behind the scenes design of boards and generally anything that could guide a new engineer or programmer. Also if you have any experience with mechanics it would be great to have a video series explaining electromechanical solutions to problems with robots or automation devices. I have learned more about mechanical solutions from watching “The Insane Engineering Of The (insert military jet or something cool here)” videos than specifically researching my mechanical problems online. I guess the problem is that people dont know what they dont know and therefor dont know what they need to know for a project. As far as elements go there isnt really specifically a best or most useful product, people need different things for different projects/ideas.
I don’t have many Alchitry-oriented wants, but I would like to give my review:
What Alchitry is good at: getting users who are new to fpgas (such as myself, as of just a year ago) off the ground. The simple UI, well integrated with the hardware, and the training-wheels nature of Lucid, all make it really easy to get going. I had a prototype which was demo-worthy in just three weeks.
What Alchitry is bad at: the stuff after that! The gui, while simple, is pretty abysmal. It is really lacking as an editor. I found the editor so frustrating to deal with, I girded my loins and figured out how to port over to Vivado, because at least then I could be using VSCode.
What that taught me: just how much stuff Alchitry was hiding from the user, to the beginning user’s extreme benefit! I am no slouch as an engineer, but it was still a shocking, uphill experience to get an independent Vivado project working even with the Alchitry-generated code as a reference. And then I needed to figure out what the Lucid training wheels were doing for me on top of that! I made it, but it was a slog.
@gc74 If you haven’t seen it, there’s an OLD tutorial using PDM mics here Sound Locating
I’m pretty interested in making a supercharged version of the original “Microphone Shield” that could make 2D images using more sophisticated methods. Might be a good “how to structure a big project” demo too. I could also record doing the PCB design/layout as a “how to make an element” tutorial.
@Random_FPGA_Guy anything specific in the electromechanical space you’re interested in? Mechatronics is what first got me interested in electronics. I like writing code that does something rather than just make pixels change colors.
@Jflanagan I’m looking into adding a LSP mode to Alchitry Labs. This could be tied into with a VSCode plugin to add Lucid support. When I looked into this when starting the Mojo IDE, LSP wasn’t a thing. It seems like a great addition from Microsoft. I don’t think it’ll be too much extra work to add and maintain support for it. Especially if the LSP is part of the main Alchitry Labs distribution and a small plugin is just needed to glue it together.
@tcmichals I agree that there are those two major groups. I think in general, other offerings support the high end/experienced users fairly well. I think the biggest weakness of Alchitry’s offerings right now is in line with what @Jflanagan mentioned, people moving from the first to the second group. Support for this needs to be improved.
@alchitry I saw this tutorial and I think I managed to retrieve the acquisition part, but for some reason the volume is very very low, maybe I missed something since the IP config changed a lot from ISE…
Well then we both have the same creation instinct (is that what you call it?). I am the only person in my friend group who can look at math and grasp the general concept, and look at electronics or mechanics and say “yeah I get it”. This is part of the reason that I love robotics, because it combines both. There isnt any specific space im interested in electromechanics, because I dont know what I need to learn. I would appreciate it if you took the time to explain why you would need mechanics in some scenarios instead of just 3d printing a body to hold the controls and motors. Explaining just electronics to somebody leaves them in the dark as to how to design a working robot. Sorry if it sounds like im rambling, but there is so so so much more potential if you teach people mechanics and electronics. After all, this is the exact sort of person to design military jets, Like the F-35B. To make it land like a helicopter, they have a clutch connecting the high powered fan in the middle of the plane to the engine. Its a somewhat simple solution which would find its place in many hobbyist or somewhat serious robots, if only the people designing them knew how to. A bit more than simple robots like a high powered drone or hexapod could use mechanics in them. Again, sorry if it sounds like I am a 90 year old man rambling about kids these days, but I hope you get my gist.
These are my first FPGAs and as a new learner, more written guides and example projects would be helpful as I learn.
Elements boards, I was thinking Sparkfun’s MicroMod on an Element carrier board so you can mix and match different microcontrollers to the FPGA (sorta like the ClockClock project but with more shared io) combining their strengths.
As for the new elements, I think an Ethernet jack would be quite nice.
For the more general side, I would like more support for using the boards with Vivado. While I think Lucid is a great consept, and the visual simulation in Alchitry Labs is very cool, I still need the actual simulator showing all the internal signals. Also, this being my second FPGA board, first being a Spartan 6 board (I upgraded only because ISE is unmaintained and quite unstable, and the Pt alpha-version price was too good to skip (Sorry, i’m probably a bad customer, hopefully you get at least some revenue from the elements I bought :|)), I already know Verilog, and I would rather use my time to learn SystemVerilog, instead of some similar, but different language. I haven’t got my board yet, but while playing with Labs, I noticed that I can get the XDC constraint files from the build folder. Still, it woulkd be nice if this was mentioned somewhere in the tutorials page. I also would like to have a constraints file with all the io-pins named in it, for use with the Br.
Hopefully not too dead of a thread, but I had a feature request for Alchitry Labs. If a line contains only white space (spaces, tabs), it would be nice if a single backspace keystroke deleted the entirety of the line. Rust Rover by Jet Brains does this and I find it quite nice!
Additionally, having the resource usage as a percentage would be nice to see in the final output. I see a table in the console with number of elements used, but having a percentage of total elements used would help with visualizing how large a design is and how much more room is available. Vivado outputs this after synthesis and implementation, so hopefully there is a way to grab it from the output.
I would be interested in tutorial topics related to motor control, PID motor control with feedback provided by an absolute encoder with an SPI interface, for example. I did this with an Arduino, but I’m sure an FPGA would be much better. Also Software Defined Radio would be a great topic for a tutorial.
Great question. There’s been a lot happening behind the scenes. I don’t think this is widely known, but I was running Alchitry out of my basement. I recently moved into a new space and am still getting things sorted.
As part of the new space, I setup a studio again and have someone who’s going to help edit videos.
We should have a fairly steady stream of videos starting soon.
@CryptoKid I know more Verilog support is import to people and that’s on my radar. For what it’s worth though, you can run test benches on Lucid and see all the internal signals.
