eForth for the J1 Simulator and actual J1 FPGAs

J1 eForth is an interactive work-in-progress Forth designed to run on the James Bowman's J1 FPGA soft core (see also J1 on Github). There is a Forth cross compiler written in Forth to generate the interactice J1 eForth system, and a J1 simulator written in C to run J1 eForth simulated on a PC.

J1 eForth also runs on actual J1 FPGAs. It has been ported to the Papilio Pro FPGA board, where it executes Forth program at 66 MHz. It communicates with a host system using a serial line at a default speed of 115200 Bits/s.

Prerequisites

• GNU make (optional) for job control
• gforth for cross compiling / generating the J1 eForth image
• WpdPack for network simulation

If you want to run J1 eForth simulated on a PC:

• gcc to compile the J1 simulator

If you want to run J1 eForth on a J1 in an FPGA:

• Xilinx ISE to generate the FPGA bit stream (ISE 14.7)
• Papilio-Loader to download the bitstream to the FPGA

Directry Structure

j1eforth
├── README.MD
├── j1.4th      cross compiler with J1 eForth
├── j1.c        J1 simulator
└── fpga  
    ├── src     Verilog projects for J1 and UART (miniuart2) for Papilio Pro 
    └── test    testbenches

Building and running the j1 Simulator

Compiling using gcc Mingw (Windows)

gcc j1.c -o -lwpcap j1.exe

Creating flash image j1.bin (and j1.hex)

gforth j1.4th

Running the Simulator

j1.exe [optional argument]

The argument to the simulator is an optional forth file that can be used to extend the dictionary
and is passed to the simulator as the first argument during startup

Words to test in the simulator : 

[ see , ' , compile , [compile] , ?branch , branch , call, .. and many more ]

Have fun , modify and pass on

Running on Real Hardware

J1 eForth can run on an actual j1 FPGA. It has been ported to the Papilio Pro FPGA board.

Create the J1 bit stream:

Start Xilinx ise on project vhdl/papiolo-pro-j1.xise choose Generate Programming File on the papilio_pro_j1 component. This generates papilio_pro_j1.bit including the Forth image (j1.hex) as initial memory (built before when generating the flash image).

Load the complete bit stream (J1 and memory) into the FPGA:

     sudo papilio-prog -v -f papilio_pro_j1.bit

You might want to use the pre-built pipilio_pro_j1.bit for a quick start.

Connect to J1 eForth:

    screen /dev/tty.usbserial 115200

or similar. J1 eForth should show the prompt

    eForth j1 v1.04
    ok

If you only see the ok prompts issue a cold and press the enter key to reboot the system.

May the Forth be with you.