Quicklogic Forums

I am new to the EOS S3 and QuickFeather. I have Win 8.1, and no Linux machine. As a first step, I thought to try ignoring the eFPGA (synthesis tools) and just work with the M4.

I think I can claim considerable experience with the Cortex-M4. I have some confidence that I can combine ingredients [Eclipse+GCC+eoss3_dev.h+Reference Manual+<a few neurons>] to construct a .elf file that would blink an LED.

Beyond that, it gets murky. The recipes for working with the board use a collection of opaque Linux-based tools, though I suspect they're mostly doing ordinary things.

1) I suspect I could use my JLink to load the program directly into RAM and run it using Segger's GDB. Segger doesn't seem to know about EOS, but it does have a generic M4.
2) From the schematic it appears that if I remove J1/J7 I have access to the GD flash pins from J3. In a pinch, I imagine I could construct a path to store (only) an M4 image using something from my gizmo box.

Are these things possible? In particular, do I need to generate an FPGA image ("tinyfpga"?) in order to run an M4 program? I know these are rookie questions, but if there's a brick wall ahead I'd prefer to know now Thanks..

The answer to step (1) is "Yes".
Now on to step (2).

The QuickFeather has two operating modes: debug and boot-from-flash. J1 and J7, when not install allows S3 to boot-from-flash when the reset button is pressed and released. In this mode, the S3 will access the flash device for valid boot image, load the image into internal RAM and execute. When J1 and J7 is installed, the SWD is active; interactive debugging is possible with debug device such as Segger's Jlink.

The Flash IO is always available. It requires IO configuration to enable the pins.

The QuickFeather flash has the default boot-loader, FPGA_loader image and a simple M4 app. To develop and test M4 app, you can create an M4 .bin file (using example code from QORC-SDK) and load into the flash using tinyfpgaprogrammer. FPGA tool is used only when you want to develop FPGA IP and use the FPGA as part of your application.