WifiNINA doesn't work with VidorBitstream

[mbyington]

I've been testing Vidor 4000 FPGA with a FPGA bitstream compiled with VidorBitstream project posted on git. FPGA works great, but when I include WifiNINA and SPI libraries, every NINA example project throws errors. For example, CheckFirmwareVersion throws "Communication with WiFi module failed!".

And from what I see I cannot use both VidorPeripherals official library (WiFiNINA works with this library) and the custom one I compiled because they both want to flash to FPGA and have conflicting header/cpp files.

Any workaround to get WiFiNINA working with VidorBitstream library?

[tksm372]

I think a UART is needed to communicate with NINA via FPGA, but in a qsys file for the Quartus Lite (free) edition, eg MKRVIDOR4000_peripherals_lite_sys.qsys, UART components are disabled because of the following reason:

Hi,
The reason lite projects lack uart is that we used the 16550 compatible uart up which is not included in the free version of quartus so we had to remove it for the lite builds.

There is a 16550 compatible UART implementation ported from the OpenCores:
https://fpgawiki.intel.com/wiki/Opencores_16550_Uart_with_avalon_interface

I think there is a possibility to use it as a replacement.

[Sausy]

@mbyington where you able to get WifiNINA running ?

[mbyington]

@mbyington where you able to get WifiNINA running ?

As tksm372 explained, UART, which is required for NINA communication, is not enabled in Quartus Lite. I tried using the 16550 compatible UART but was not able to get anywhere with it.

I was hoping the online visual programming tools that were touted here for several months for the Vidor 4000 would be done by now, but unfortunately they don't seem to have an end in sight.