Getting Started with the SPEC

Project description

The SPEC Getting Started project provides a detailed tutorial on how to get ready to work with the (SPEC), including hardware deployment instructions, full required toolchain setup and a collection of step-by-step demonstrative tutorials.

The tutorial is composed of two main parts:

Document covering the process of building a full SPEC design, from designing the gateware to handling the board from a user-space application running on a Linux Host PC.

Companion step-by-step demos, demonstrating how to use the different development tools that are required for bringing up a new project in the SPEC board from the ground up.

Main Features

The document and demos assume that the user has no previous or very little experience inside the Open Hardware Repository initiative. For this
reason, the tutorial introduces different resources from OHR while covering the next design issues:

An in depth explanation of the SPEC hardware board, exposing its main features, introducing the PCB design and the FMC standard and available modules and explaining the different operation modes.

How to design a FPGA gateware for the SPEC board, from introducing the Wishbone bus and its associated OHR tools to building a bitstream from the included HDL demos.

How to handle the SPEC board from a Linux Host, including the use of the official user-space C software support, direct access to the PCI bus and the interactive control of the board from a Python shell.