lundi 7 octobre 2024

Drumulator and Efinix FPGA.

The fact is that I have made good progress on the transcription of the Drumulator into an FPGA.

But what craftsmanship job is the management of vectorized interruptions on the Z80! It 'smells' like the thing put in place last, with the resources still available for the circuit, and added on top of the logic of the processor itself! 

Well, that's the effect it has on me. So, it's a bit complicated to create a circuit that responds to this mechanism, especially the CTC circuit, very important in the Drumulator. I still got there.

But another problem arises. I wanted to recover the values ​​of the display digits in registers in order to be able to exploit them as I wanted, but using the small resources of the FPGA development board, I absolutely cannot get an idea of ​​how the multiplexing of the display is set up.

Obviously, everyone knows the principle of multiplexing, and basically, it works in the standard way on the Drumulator, but I retrieve multiple information in the registers. So, and as I have already set up the display of the Dumulator on an FPGA board equipped with 7-segment displays, I decided to create a small display/keyboard card functioning in the same way as the hardware implemented on the Drumulator. And in any case this card will allow me to work more easily with the Efinix FPGA board because it only has 8 user LEDs in total: it's really too few and it's a real criticism that the 'we can do with this board.

Here is what I sent to be done:


Although the Drumulator display only has 4 digits, I implemented 8, which will allow me to also display other debugging information if necessary.

So I'm putting this topic in standby until I receive the printed circuit  board and can mount and test this display/keyboard card.


5 commentaires:

  1. C'est Super ;) une machine pour faire du bon son. j'ai hâte de la voir en situation. A bientôt. Philippe INTERVIEW

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  2. Merci pour ce commentaire Philippe. Le genre de petite attention qui aide à avancer ;-)

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  3. Pour le réglage du tempo, des touches pas de potentiomètre ?

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  4. Au niveau look les fonctions me semblent à la même place sauf pour les potards. Philippe INTERVIEW ;)

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  5. Il ne s'agit ici que de prototype pour tester le clavier et les afficheurs. Si bien sûr il y aura les potentiomètres. Mais la gestion du potentiomètre de données par exemple est tellement ésotérique sur la Drum, que je verrai ça après avoir réussi à faire démarrer correctement le logiciel de la Drum avec cette carte ;-)

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