I always fancied the idea of exploring the world of programmable logic a little more, so I had the idea to use a FPGA for providing some peripherals to the 6502. Obviously that is what the Xosera board is already doing for graphics. But it would be nice, to also have PS/2 keyboard and mouse and an SD card interface.

So I came across the Colorlight 5a-75b board, which is meant for controlling LED lines (as far as my understanding goes). The cool part is, that it features a Lattice ECP5 FPGA which is quite beefy and lots of the pins are routed to connectors on the board. As a bonus there is also SDRAM and gigabit ethernet onboard. And all this for under 20$ on AliExpress. I saw that there were already some projects using the opensource FPGA tools supporting this board. And there was already lots of documentation available So I quickly ordered one.

Later I found, that the FPGA IOs are connected using driver chips that are wired as output only on the board. Luckily Claude Schwarz had already found a way to replace the driver chips with bidirectional ones, that could also used for 5V level adaption, since the FPGA IOs are 3.3V max. You just have to connect a 1N4007 diode in series to you 5V power supply, so you have a diode drop and the supply voltage then is 4.3V. If 4.3 V is placed on the gate of the SN74CBT3245APW FETs, the maximum passable signal is 3.3 V (approximately 1 V less than the gate voltage). So you get 5V tolerance.

For connecting PMOD peripherals (PS/2 and SDCard is readily available in that form) there is an even simpler solution. These flex PCBs can be ordered from OSH park for 2.80$ including shipping to germany, which is really a bargain.

These are gorgeous

As I had all the parts collected and also some free time available, I started modding the Colorlight hardware. Half of the IOs should be 5V compatible for connecting it to my 6502, the other half should provide PMOD connectivity.

First of all I had to get rid of the 74HC245T levelshifters. I found this video very inspiring:

I gave it a try myself. Unfortunately I did not have the nice big chisel tip, which made things more complicated.

I hope you are not offended by my SMD soldering skills. For me this is a project where I can practise. I hope I can encourage some people to give it a try too. If I can do it, anybody can.

So this method basically worked. But it took ages. Since I do not need the 74HC245Ts anymore, I decided to try cutting the pins with an exacto knife, which works surprisingly well.

After that you only have to remove the remaining pins by collecting them with the tip of the soldering iron.

Soldering the flex PCBs was something I had never done before. The trick is to apply some tin to the pads before laying them on the board. Then it goes smoothly.

Soldering the SN74CBT3245APW was a little more challenging and I had to verify that each pin was soldered properly.

I am quite pleased with the result:

Finally...

So at that point I needed some help to get the GPIOs tested using Verilog code. Luckily Xark gave me some help on the Zeromips discord channel. He wrote a gpio tester for the UPduino board which is used for Xosera. I could adapt it to the Colorlight board. After I removed some stupid copy and pasted typos, all the ports worked perfectly.

Here is a picture of the six GPIOs on one port tested sequentially:

Logic analyzer goodness

So I call this modification a success and can now start implementing something useful with this board. There is already some PMODs waiting…

This is a nice collection