arty Arty: Display UART data on LEDs

[Ben]

Hi all

I have a very simply UART TX/RX pair I have built in Verilog, and have been struggling to get them to function on the Arty Board.

I can connect the two together to form a simple "echo" function, where any received RX data is immediately sent out on the TX module, but beyond that I can't correctly see the values I send to the Arty.

I tried simply piping the received byte to the LEDs on the Arty board, but the values lit up do not correspond at all to the ones I expect. Sending the character string "AaA" does not make the ascii encodings for "A" and "a" appear on the LEDs. However, I do get the right characters echoed back to my PuTTY terminal.

My code for the project can be found here: https://github.com/ben-marshall/uart

You'll need: rtl/uart_rx.v , rtl/uart_tx.v, rtl/impl_top.v and constraints/default.xdc to re-create the project.

I'm using Vivado 2016.4 on Ubuntu 16.04.

Thanks,
Ben

[D@n]

Hi @Ben!  Welcome to the fun problem of UART's.  I commend you for trying to build the UART in Verilog, rather than using a canned module.  That said, I can offer you a touch of help:

Some time ago, I built a UART simulator as part of a more generic UART project.  Using that simulator, I can build my Verilog project, convert it to C++ via Verilator, and then communicate with my design either via the standard input and standard output file I/O streams, or even using TCP/IP streams.  Should you wish to use this simulator, you'll find several examples that use it, as well as instructions for how to use it within the repository.

May I suggest you look into connecting your current code into the UART simulator?  You can then use it to create a .VCD file which you can pull up with GTKwave if you would like to evaluate what your code is doing ...

Hope this helps,

Dan

[Ben]

Hi Dan

Thank you for your reply, I will certainly take a look at your simulator. I actually have it working now, with exactly half of the ASCII table. Everything with bit 4 set just displays a block character. Everything with bit 4 unset works perfectly.

I'm stumped haha.

Ben

[D@n]

@Ben,

Okay ... that's not quite there, but you are making progress!  Let me know how it works out for you,

Dan