First Steps With Papilio One & Breadboard

Dave over at Whiley.org just got his new Papilio One and decided to document some of the first steps he’s taking with the board. His endgame is to take the Arduino-based tank robot he’s made and eventually power it with his shiny new Papilio. These are some of his efforts so far.

The question is: what do you do with this thing? Well, that’s what I’ve been figuring out. The first thing you need is the Xilinx IDE which you can download and use for free. Then, you need to learn VHDL or Verilog.

Dave’s got a breadboard hooked up to his Papilio in the shot above; he’s connected two LEDs to the output pins of the Papilio. He wrote a “VHDL program which implements a two bit counter clocked by one of the inputs (i.e. so the counter increments whenever we see a rising edge on the input.)” In the video,

Pin 0 from the A bank of inputs (i.e. W1A) is being used to clock the counter. This is then written to the first 2 pins of the C bank (i.e. W2C), with all other output pins pulled to 0. Anyhow, you can see the whole in action here:

And lastly, here’s a video of Dave’s robot tank that he intends to power eventually with the Papilio – So Dave, keep us updated with any new progress on your project. We’d love to see that thing running on the Papilio!

(via Whiley.org)