Hello Larry!

I am excited for class on May 7, thank you so much for putting it together! Reading about the pico2-ice, lots of capability - https://pico2-ice.tinyvision.ai/index.html. Advance question is that it's interesting that this one doesn't have a JTAG so it's all serial/FTDI to configure the FPGA? - I will check out the tools to see if there is a neat workflow with a VM or homebrew which would give a few more options.

Thanks!

-Angela

On Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 5:01 PM Larry Doolittle via sudo-discuss <sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:

Arik -

On Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 10:30:45PM +0000, arik via sudo-discuss wrote:
> May 7 sounds good. Any preliminary reading or concepts we should look into?

Maybe review the basic vocabulary of Boolean logic.
What do AND and OR and NOT really mean?
How do you express those as a truth table?

My outline of lessons is:

1. Boolean logic expressed with electronics, specfically TTL gates
and wires. We'll hook up switches and LEDs and see the logic happen.

2. Repeat the experiments of (1) with an FPGA substituting for the
TTL gates. Needs a computer (laptop) running yosys and nextpnr-ice40.
Debian Trixie is known good, and a recent Ubuntu should also be easy.
If you prefer something else, LMK and I can work with you ahead of time
to get the toolchain installed. I'll supply the $50 pico2-ice FPGA board.

3. Synthesize and run clocked logic to create sounds; based on the
fpga4fun MusicBox lesson at https://www.fpga4fun.com/MusicBox.html .

- Larry
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