Woot ! The board is here !

I open the small box, and first surprise, the board is here, the power supply too, but nothing more... No CD, no manual, no datasheet or whatever...

Riiiight, so I fired up my favorite browser and went to the page dedicated to my brand new S3 starter board. I downloaded all the documents here, and then went to the ISE WebPACK page, to download the software.

After some browsing and attempts, I figured out that the device is a "xc3s200" and the package is "ft256". I grabbed the first example of Fabrice Derepas website, struggled a bit with Xilinx's PACE software (to figure out soon that it was much faster to edit the .ucf file by hand).

I generated then a PROM file with the iMPACT software, not really sure of my parameters' values, then there has been some small "panic" moments when I encountered many "Programming Failed" messages... Finally, the four "F" letters showed up on the 7-segments displays, giving me a pure moment of satisfaction :)

I programmed the device with the Xilinx example PROM, that shows all the features of the board : VGA, serial port, leds, push buttons, switches, 7-segments display...

All seemed to work fine, but I was not able to test the serial link, as my laptop has no serial port. I need to get a USB serial port, as I will need it : in my thoughts about my computer system design (I need to find a name for it quickly, too), I had the idea to use the serial port to communicate with the Forth interpreter.

Then I played a bit with the leds and 7-segments display, wrote a small VHDL utility module to display a 16-bit value on the 7-segment display, under the sight of my wife probably worrying about my mental health :)