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#code#run#built#tools#course#studio#wanted#beginners#entire#eda

Discussion (4 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

wozniakpawelβ€’6 days ago
Hey! I'm Pawel. I built this solo over the past several months.

The problem I wanted to solve: one of the barricades for the beginners learning hardware design is having to spend an entire evening setting up EDA tools, just to see a single waveform. A lot of beginners will give up fairly quickly before even getting to writing any code. I decided to make it easier for them and build a browser-based IDE. RisingEdge lets you write VHDL or SystemVerilog, run a simulation, see the waveform, and even check what the code actually synthesizes into. Everything is built with real open-source tools (GHDL, Icarus Verilog, Yosys).

I put a lot of effort into making the synthesis view good for new learners. You can see a gate level netlist with cell counts, a block level view highlighting the code that produced the block, and even auto-generated state machine diagrams to make debug easier.

There are 3 separate ways to use the tool: - Learn: a full course from Fundamentals to Advanced, over 100 lessons, examples, and exercises each - Practice: over 50 challenges built to sound like real-world engineering tasks - Playground: lets you run any arbitrary RTL if you want to try things out or just see what it synthesizes into

Most of the content is free with no account: the entire Practice section, the Playground, and the Fundamentals section of the curriculum. The only paid thing is the full course - and it's billed as a single non-recurring payment.

Happy to answer any questions!

dlcarrierβ€’6 days ago
I used to think EDA tools for FPGAs were the absolute worst development environment, until I wanted to modify an open-source application on my phone, and tried to install and run Android Studio. It manages to out bloat both Vivado and Quartus. At least I wouldn't need to buy a special computer to run it, like the Xcode development environment for iOS.

I've ended up using Yosys from a command line, while editing the files in a text editor.

wozniakpawelβ€’6 days ago
Ha! I've worked with all of those and can't even tell you how much I agree. I think I'd also add Visual Studio to the list; recently I switched to command line compilation and editing code in VSCode and do not miss Visual Studio, not even one bit of it.
tamimioβ€’about 2 hours ago
It looks promising, thanks for sharing, but 12months access isn’t great, it should be unlimited just like other platforms, you bought the course, you access it whenever. Cheers