ESP8266 based Xilinx Virtual Cable server?

[Wojciech M. Zabolotny]

Hi,

I often need to access the debugged FPGA boards remotely. Now when Xilinx
has made its Xilinx Virtual Cable specification available:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/intellectual-property/xvc.html
https://github.com/Xilinx/XilinxVirtualCable

and when it is included in the newer versions of Vivado suite:
http://forums.xilinx.com/t5/General-Technical-Discussion/XVC-Protocol-Support-In-Vivado/td-p/387977
http://forums.xilinx.com/xlnx/attachments/xlnx/GenDis/21028/1/ProdDoc_XVC_2014%203.pptx

it seems, that it should be relatively easy to implement a cheap, Internet
enabled programmer/debugger.
The ESP8266 $3 module ( http://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=esp8266-module-family )
seems to be a good candidate to provide authenticated access via Wi-Fi to the debugged board.

It is an open question whether that chip has sufficient resources to
implement the XVC server, but it seems that this idea is worth of further
investigation.
I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions regarding this idea.

With best regards,
Wojtek

 

[Wojciech M. Zabołotny]

Dnia 20.05.2015 Wojciech M. Zabolotny <wzab@ise.pw.edu.pl> napisał/a:

Hi,

I often need to access the debugged FPGA boards remotely. Now when Xilinx
has made its Xilinx Virtual Cable specification available:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/intellectual-property/xvc.html
https://github.com/Xilinx/XilinxVirtualCable

and when it is included in the newer versions of Vivado suite:
http://forums.xilinx.com/t5/General-Technical-Discussion/XVC-Protocol-Support-In-Vivado/td-p/387977
http://forums.xilinx.com/xlnx/attachments/xlnx/GenDis/21028/1/ProdDoc_XVC_2014%203.pptx

it seems, that it should be relatively easy to implement a cheap, Internet
enabled programmer/debugger.
The ESP8266 $3 module ( http://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=esp8266-module-family )
seems to be a good candidate to provide authenticated access via Wi-Fi to the debugged board.

It is an open question whether that chip has sufficient resources to
implement the XVC server, but it seems that this idea is worth of further
investigation.
I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions regarding this idea.

With best regards,
Wojtek

Hi,

I have written a quick&dirty Lua implementation for ESP8266 with nodemcu
firmware. The code is posted to alt.sources usenet group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.sources/RZbOS12JgMI

The first results seem to be promising, but unfortunately, I have found
information about serious problems with XVC plugin in ISE14 (which still
has to be used for older Xilinx FPGAs).
The problem is reported here:
http://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Design-Tools-Others/iMPACT-XVC-broken-with-multiple-devices/td-p/496232
And it is not clear if Xilinx is going to fix it :-(.

Until the mentioned bug is fixed (by Xilinx), and until the code is rewritten
in C, to obtain reasonable performance, the ESP8266 based XVC server is not
very useful...

With best regards,
Wojtek