FTDI

The Upduino FPGA development board is a cheap way to start with (OSS) FPGA development on the Lattice ICE40 platform. Unfortunately, there are few peripherals on the PCB and there’s no official way for communicate between FPGA application and PC. This post explains how we can reuse the FPGA programmer to transmit data to the FPGA without any additional hardware, using only the programmer USB port. ...

FTDI chips are commonly used for FPGA boards and microcontroller programmer boards. Apart from basic UART, advanced FTDI chips also support synchronous IO using the MPSSE mode. Unfortunately, examples for MPSSE are outdated, Windows-only or otherwise limited. This tutorial therefore explains the MPSSE basics and presents a simple SPI communication example for an FT232H controller using libftdi. ...