About building the ecosystem to get .xpr and buildroot

[albertryou2]

Hi everyone,

In order to learn about the FPGA side of Red Pitaya, I'm (blindly) following the steps outlined in https://github.com/RedPitaya/RedPitaya to build the ecosystem. To my understanding, the goal of doing this is to make an .xpr file out of all the various ingredients so that I can have a fully functioning Verilog code and not just pieces of it lying around on Github. Alas, I'm facing an "error" during the "make" process, which is that it tries to connect to http://buildroot.uclibc.org but the whole website is down (and it has been down for a while).

However, if I just skip this step, and proceed to running "make project" in the fpga folder, then I get a folder "project" inside of which is "redpitaya.xpr". It seems like this is the .xpr file for the default FPGA configuration. I have loaded it on Red Pitaya and successfully tested the "generate" utility as well as the scpi server.

So my question is: what do I need the buildroot tool for?

Thanks!
Albert

[Nils Roos]

To my understanding, the goal of doing this is to make an .xpr file out of all the various ingredients so that I can have a fully functioning Verilog code and not just pieces of it lying around on Github.

That is a slight misunderstanding. The goal of doing "make" in the Red Pitaya folder is to build the complete set of Red Pitaya-specific software - everything you can find on the first partition of the sd-card. That includes the FPGA bitstream, linux kernel, network support tools, a ramdisk image with a collection of shell tools and support libs (this comes from buildroot), nginx webserver, etc.

What you won't get by doing just "make" is the red_pitaya.xpr, because that is not needed to generate the FPGA bitstream.

So if your only goal is to generate the Vivado project, you found the right command already. It's highly unlikely that you will ever need to rebuild the buildroot stuff.

[albertryou2]

Thanks as always