An Acorn on fpgas.online

This page explains what an Acorn is and what a visitor can do with one on welland.fpgas.online. It does not cover setting one up, which is SQRL Acorn and LiteFury under Admin documentation.

The card

The SQRL Acorn CLE-215+ is an M.2 PCIe card with a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, DDR3 memory and a quad-SPI flash. At welland each card sits in an M.2 HAT on a Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi reaches its FPGA over JTAG on the Pi’s header and over PCIe. The camera over the card shows its four user LEDs (The camera on a board).

What the board page offers

An Acorn’s page is the page every board has, with a terminal, an upload, the camera and a Reset (the board page). The page does not load a design for you. You load it from the terminal, as on How to load a design onto an Acorn from its board page.

A load goes into the FPGA’s SRAM. On a converted card the flash keeps the fpgas.online design, which runs again after a Reset. An unconverted card runs its factory image (fpgas-verify: what an Acorn check tests).

Designs on the host

Where the Acorn packages are installed, the host carries the fpgas.online Acorn design. It is in /usr/share/fpgas-online/acorn-pcie/images/: for each card the flash images, the operational .bit and the register maps. What the design holds is on The fpgas.online Acorn design.