Very impressed with free (!!!) Astrobe for RISC5 FPGA

Newcomers to Astrobe and Oberon are welcome to ask any beginner-level questions here
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berkeleynerd
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Very impressed with free (!!!) Astrobe for RISC5 FPGA

Post by berkeleynerd » Mon Dec 14, 2020 7:21 pm

I was able to go from zero to hello-world in just a few hours despite never having used a tool like Vivado to program an FPGA before. The Arty S7-50 is painless to use via USB with microSD pmod with the Astrobe IDE. The instructions provided were all very clear with no guesswork.

Is it possible to modify the Oberon Embedded OS and create a .img file given the tools and source code provided?

Thanks and Kind Regards

cfbsoftware
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Re: Very impressed with free (!!!) Astrobe for RISC5 FPGA

Post by cfbsoftware » Tue Dec 15, 2020 8:59 am

Thank you for your positive feedback. It is very much appreciated.

We haven't released the tools that we use to create the disk image but Andreas Pirklbauer, one of the other guys who has modified the OS has. You can find them at:

https://github.com/andreaspirklbauer/Ob ... ding-tools

berkeleynerd
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Re: Very impressed with free (!!!) Astrobe for RISC5 FPGA

Post by berkeleynerd » Tue Dec 15, 2020 8:50 pm

Thanks so much. I'll dig into this over the holidays.

If I understand correctly, the idea will be to follow the procedure and use the tools provided by Andreas to create a bootable .img file from the oberon source files provided with Astrobe? Sounds like a fun holiday vacation to me! 8-)

cfbsoftware
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Re: Very impressed with free (!!!) Astrobe for RISC5 FPGA

Post by cfbsoftware » Fri Dec 18, 2020 7:24 am

There's also some useful information in Chapter 14 Building and maintenance tools of the Project Oberon book which is accessible from Astrobe for RISC5 > Help > Project Oberon.

Note that you only need to rebuild the disk image if you modify and relink the inner core of the Project Oberon OS, which consists of modules Kernel, FileDir, Files, and Modules.

Feel free to ask further questions here if any part of the process is unclear.

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