I've always said a project is a success if you can turn it on and not have to pick pieces of it out of your face afterwards. By that measure, the CAT Board is a success.

I didn't get that much done today. I had to wrap presents for a birthday party later in the day, and I talked with my sister about her parrot that escaped from her house. But I did manage to get a few steps into my testing plan.

First, I measured the connectivity of the voltage and ground planes. I didn't find any shorts between any of them. So far, so good.

Then I connected a 5V supply to the external power jack with an ammeter in series. No current! I measured the voltages and the 5V was down to 3.7V, the 3.3V was down to 2.8V, and the 1.2V was at 1.2V. It turns out the P-channel MOSFET I'm using for polarity protection wasn't fully turning on and was dropping the 5V. Looks like I'm going to have to find a MOSFET with a lower threshold than the DMP3098L-7.

I rummaged around in my big box of power adapters and found a 6V supply with the proper polarity and a 2.1 mm plug. Plugging that in seems to provide enough oomph to get the MOSFET conducting. All the voltage regulator outputs went to their specified values.

But still no current! Turns out I'm used to FPGAs that draw 30 mA of static current, but the iCE40 is intended for low-power applications so it doesn't do that. Typical current to the FPGA core is 1.14 mA, but I'm not even seeing that. Possibly the FPGA goes into an even lower power mode if it isn't loaded with a valid bitstream.

I measured the output of the 100 MHz oscillator and saw the 100 MHz clock (actually, with my scope, I saw a 100 MHz sine wave). I also checked the reset button: yep, the FPGA reset gets pulled low when the button gets pressed.

That was about as far as I got. Tomorrow I'll continue, mostly with getting the RPi configured with the IceStorm tools. I won't have much time to do that since I have to go down to my sister's farm later in the day.

Gotta find that damn bird.