Day 1 (10th June 2019)

I received my NeTV2 board today (yay!) and I spent a bit of time unboxing it and trying to get it up over a Thunderbolt-to-PCI Express bridge. It was unsuccessful, I suspect the stock bitstream doesn’t have the PCI Express core enabled. If that’s not the case then probably my approach won’t work here I guess.

The Thunderbolt-to-PCIe bridge is a dissected Thunderbolt 3 SSD and I put a M.2 to PCIe slot converter into the M.2 Slot of the Thunderbolt 3 SSD, and the NeTV2 sits on top of them. My laptop detects the Thunderbolt 3 bridge but not the NeTV2 board yet. Let’s see if I can get it to work once I am able to build for the NeTV2.

[7:16PM] I am going to go through ZipCPU tutorial on wires and regs today and try some Verilator first.

[8:24PM] Successfully recreated thruwire example in Verilator.

[8:30PM] That’s it for today! Warmed up with using Verilator, in the next one or two days I’ll try something on the TinyFPGA board.