ulx3s-toolchain

ULX3S FPGA, RISC-V, ESP32 toolchain installer scripts.

This toolchain builder focuses on the ULX3S and Ubuntu (including WSL), but can easily be adapted to other platforms and target FPGA chips.

The ULX3S is now at Crowd Supply!

Run install_all.sh to install everything, or see each individual install_[feature].sh file.

There's also a ./install.sh barebones to install only the essentials for FPGA: verilator/yosys/nextpnr/fujprog. (useful for Visual Studio)

For a quick start without compiling everything yourself, kost has some precompiled binary releases.

For Multi-platform nightly builds of open source FPGA tools, check out fpga-toolchain.

Introduction

This script automates and consolidates the many different toolchain scripts. (FPGA, ESP32, LiteX)

Installation logs are saved in $WORKSPACE/install_logs/ with suffixes YYYYMMSS_HHMMSS such as 20200307_105326

Installation will pause if an error is encountered.

For getting started, see the included ulx3s-examples, the fpga-odysseus/tutorials, emard's ulx3s PCB and ulx3s-misc miscellaneous examples (advanced). The ulx3s.github.io has even more resources.

See timvideos LiteX for Hardware Engineers

Requirements

Note that in a fresh Ubuntu VM, 36GB of disk space and 5GB (5,120 MB) of RAM is the minimum neccessary. for all components to install successfully.

see init.sh for setting parameters. Of particular interest (consider putting in ~/.bashrc - edit for your respective device):

For Ubuntu

WORKSPACE=~/workspace
THIS_ULX3S_DEVICE=LFE5U-85F
ULX3S_COM=/dev/ttyS8

# for ESP32 IDF
cd ~/esp/esp-idf/
. ./export.sh

# the apt-get is now optional (needed for individual Ubuntu and WSL install files other than "all")
# the default it to not use apt-get, so we need to turn it on
export APTGET=1

For WSL:

WORKSPACE=/mnt/c/workspace
THIS_ULX3S_DEVICE=LFE5U-85F
ULX3S_COM=/dev/ttyS8

# for ESP32 IDF
cd ~/esp/esp-idf/
. ./export.sh

# the apt-get is now optional (needed for individual Ubuntu and WSL install files other than "all")
# the default it to not use apt-get, so we need to turn it on
export APTGET=1

Reminder: WSL numbers are [n-1] (e.g. ttyS8 is COM9) (edit: this appears to no longer be the case?)

The install is generally attention-free, although so ridiculously long that the sudo command will occasionally re-ask for a password.

Consider using sudo visudo to extend or disable the sudo timeout. See this. Use with caution and common sense. It would probably be wise to remove this upon completion:

Add this line to disable sudo timeouts from asking for a password repeatedly during install:

Defaults    timestamp_timeout=-1

Note that OpenOCD installation fetches some code from repo.or.cz domain. Keep this in mind if your firewall or dns blocker blocks some domains.

Installation

Quick Start, only the bare essentials:

cd ~
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ulx3s/ulx3s-toolchain/master/install.sh
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh barebones aptget

Full Install

Install everything:

cd ~
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ulx3s/ulx3s-toolchain/master/install.sh
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh aptget

or

sudo apt-get install git --assume-yes
mkdir -p ~/workspace
cd ~/workspace
git clone https://github.com/ulx3s/ulx3s-toolchain.git
cd ulx3s-toolchain
chmod +x ./install.sh
./install.sh aptget

ULX3S Binaries

Binaries specific to the ULX3S are generated during the full install.

See ./install_litex-ulx3s.sh

Results

The ESP32 toolchain is installed to ~/esp. Everything else is installed to the directory in $WORKSPACE

See:

BIOS: $WORKSPACE/linux-on-litex-vexriscv/build/ulx3s/software/bios for: emulator.bin and bios.bin

$WORKSPACE/litex-boards/litex_boards/targets

FPGA: $WORKSPACE/litex-boards/litex_boards/targets/soc_basesoc_ulx3s/gateware top.bit

$WORKSPACE/litex-boards/litex_boards/targets/soc_basesoc_ulx3s/software/bios

Programmming and Code Upload

Windows WSL Ubuntu

cd $WORKSPACE/litex-boards/litex_boards/targets/soc_basesoc_ulx3s/gateware

$WORKSPACE/ulx3s-examples/bin/ujprog.exe top.bit

Ubuntu

cd $WORKSPACE/litex-boards/litex_boards/targets/soc_basesoc_ulx3s/gateware

$WORKSPACE/ulx3s-examples/bin/ujprog top.bit

Other tips

List ip interfaces:

ip link

Add an IP address for interface ens33:

sudo ip address add 192.168.100.100/24 dev ens33

Show IP address(s):

ip address

Find all the files and directories that contain the word ULX3S (case insensitive)

find / -xdev 2>/dev/null -iname "*ULX3S*"

if litex init and install was run with sudo, use this to fix re-running ./ulx3s.py and ./make.py

sudo chown $USER $WORKSPACE/litex-boards/litex_boards/targets

Find all files created after a given date/time in Powershell:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -ge "03/08/2020 4:25pm" }