The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket

[WARNING] Please read carefully this note before using this project. It contains important facts.

Content

1. What is The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket, and when to use it ?
2. What should you know before using The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket ?
3. How to use The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket ?
4. Known issues
5. Miscellanous

1. What is The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket, and when to use it ?

• The Colorlight i9 by Muse Lab is an FPGA based board, powered by a Lattice ECP5 FPGA.
• Amaranth HDL, previously nMigen is a python library to generate an abstract syntax tree of an hardware design, in order to configure a supported FPGA .

The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket aims to be a Resource abstraction layer for FPGA projects, by providing an access to the commodities of the board (HDMI output, EPROM, RAM,...).

Then a guest project can glue those commodities with an actual design, like e.g. interfacing a vintage CPU and emulate the behavior of a vintage computer.

What's new in v0.1.0

• First release : the onboard led blinks every second, and when branched to an HDMI screen, a solid-colored screen blinks between a blue-ish and a yellow-ish color.

Licence

The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ .

2. What should you know before using The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket ?

The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket requires a set of tools to build and deploy to an actual Colorlight i9 board :

• To build the bitstream : Python 3.10 or later up to 3.12, pip and pdm ; then all the dependencies required to generate the bitstream are pulled by pdm ; the most essential with regard to designing hardware logic and building the bitstream for the ECP5 FPGA :

  • amaranth.
  • amaranth-boards.
  • amaranth-stuff, notably contains the TMDS encoder.
  • Some tools from the Unofficial WebAssembly-based packages for Yosys, nextpnr, and more : yowasp-yosys and yowasp-nextpnr-ecp5

• to upload the bitstream, you will need a tool to perform this task (like openFPGALoader or ecpdap). This project provides a pdm script to use openFPGALoader.

Do not use The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket if this project is not suitable for your project

3. How to use The Cradle for MuseLab's Colorlight i9 by Sporniket ?

From source

To build the bitstream only.

git clone https://github.com/sporniket/the-cradle-colorlight-i9-ecp5-amaranth-hdl.git
cd the-cradle-colorlight-i9-ecp5-amaranth-hdl
python3 -m pdm sync
python3 -m pdm run make_bitstream

Then upload the bitstream file build/top.bit into the ECP5 with your favorite tool. 

If you have installed openFPGALoader, and with the Colorlight board plugged in :

python3 -m pdm run make_and_deploy

4. Known issues

See the project issues page.

5. Miscellanous

Report issues

Use the project issues page.