What workflow for black ice II? Ive been on “sabbatical”

[Wells]

Hi,

So I’m a BI2 owner, and am just starting to re-educate myself on the toolchain used to get from verilog to bitstream upload. I use a Mac but perhaps we should ignore that for now, unless that would make a major difference to the answer to the following question: what is recommended for programming a black ice 2 these days? Should I research/acquire new tools such as Symbiflow and NextPNR? I was using atom to write code, and though I can’t remember the specific steps I believe most of them came from the ice storm toolchain, and due to the Mac were a bit convoluted but worked ok.

Should I look into symbiflow?

Thanks, Wells

[Folknology]

Hi Wells couple of immediate thoughts:

• NextPNR can offer efficiency and timing improvements over the Icestorm standard ArachnePNR
• We still just 'cat' or 'cp' to the serial device for uploading so prob no changes there, and more editors have verilog support so take your pick from those.
• Symbiflow offers formal tooling within Verilog (Systemverilog like), definitely worth learning about if you haven't checked them out yet, take a look at @ZipCPU 's excellent tutorials

I am sure others might want add to this thead.
welcome back BTW..

[Wells]

Awesome, thanks. I need to take a look at my original workflow again (if I can figure out where I landed) so I can inform my questions in more detail; for example I may have been using apio for some things... Since I am using a Mac my journey was a bit more convoluted but in the end I was able to get from verilog to board in 5-6 steps and it became somewhat automatic, or at least didn’t involve long periods of staring at the screen

Anyway at least I have some direction, and will dive into Symbiflow and get nextPNR. Thanks, and I’ll post progress if I think it’ll help at all

Wells