If you have a G2 you might want to checkout my panog2_ldr project before reading on.
This project updates the Xilinx image embedded in the Panologic's progfpga programmer utility with a new user provided image.
Why?
Using a JTAG or SPI programmer to update the flash in a Pano requires an investment in a programmer and requires disassembling the Pano to gain access to the programming connectors. Sometimes a more convenient method is handy.
If you are one of those that picked up a Pano but never got around to doing anything with it now is your chance. Dig your Pano out of your garage, checkout Tom's Raytracer, or my pano_man or one of the other pano projects and give it a try.
While a JTAG programmer is certainly a requirement for development progfpga provides a fast and easy way to load your latest creation on to a Pano device for whatever reason.
Warning: No known images other than the original Pano Logic image implement Pano's protocol so this is a one way update unless you install an image such as panog2_ldr which supports future updates or use a JTAG programmer.
Pano Logic was a Bay Area startup that manufactured tiny thin clients that were connected to a central server. The Pano devices have a Ethernet interface, a few USB ports, audio input and output ports, and one or two video ports.
The first generation (G1) Pano was based on the largest Xilinx Spartan-3E family chip and supported a single VGA monitor.
The second generation (G2) supported two DVI monitors. Revision A and B of the G2 devices were based on the Spartan-6 LX150 which is the largest chip in the family. The revision C G2 device is based on the smaller LX100 device which is still quite large by hobbist standards.
Unfortunately for Pano Logic, but fortunate for FPGA hobbists Pano Logic when out of business in 2012. Shortly thereafter TONS of both new and used Pano Logic devices started showing up on ebay for very little money since they were pretty much useless without support. Even today (April 2019) both versions of the Pano Logic devices are still readily available on ebay for little.
Tom Verbeure has spent a lot of time reverse engineering the Pano Logic devices and created a absolute mind blowing raytracing demo that runs on a G1 device. It was the Hackaday article article on his project that originally attracted my attention to the Pano hacking scene.
Tom's article also got the attention of Wenting Zhang who added support for the G1's SDRAM and USB controller as well as making it possible to execute code on a soft processor directly from the SPI flash. I can't wait until he finishes porting his Verilog Boy project to the Pano.
Progfpga is a 32 bit Linux x86 program that can be run on any OS that can run 32 bit Linux binaries. The Pano provided VM is fine if you don't mind a 4.4 gigabyte download that expands to 14 gigabytes when imported.
I copied the progfpga command utility to my 64 bit Ubuntu 18.04 system and had no problems running it after I installed 32 bit libraries.
The orignal Pano progfpga utility is provided in this repository to save you the hassle of downloading the VM. Surprisingly no copyright notices appears in any of the source code or utilities in the Pano VM, nor is there a click though license agreement.
If you want to go the VM route start here, or create a 32 bit Linux VM of your choice.
We need a BINARY fpaga image (not a .bit file) for progfpga. One can be created at the same time as the .bit file by checking the Create Binary Configuration File option in process properties the for the Generate Programming File process.
After running the Generate Programming File process a .bin file should be created in the same subdirectory as the .bit file.
Please refer to the Series1 and Series2 files for series specific progamming instructions.
When Pano Logic was still alive they published a number of help videos on
youtube including this video which describes the FPGA image update process.
The 21 minute video directs one to a CentOS 4.5 Linux P2V virtual machine which amazingly was
still downloadable in 2019 from
here.
When I downloaded and ran the VM I found a treasure load of information on the Pano as well as the update utilities described in the video. I even found some source code!. Apparently the VM was created from a system that has been used for developing code to burn-in and test Pano devices.
Following the directions in the video I had no problem updating one of my Pano G1 devices, to the "current" Pano Logic firmware, but that wasn't my goal, I wanted to flash my own firmware.
My hope when I downloaded the VM was that the flash utility updated the Pano using a .bit file from somewhere, but I had no luck finding one.
Since I had been wanting to play with the NSA's Ghidra reverse engineering tool anyway the Pano Logic flash update tool provided a perfect excuse.
Once I watched the introductory video to help me learn the slightly non-intuitive UI it didn't take long to find where the image was coming from. It's embedded in the application in a somewhat odd format.
The memory address of latestFpgaImage is found in the Symbol Table window.
I couldn't figure out how to get Ghidra to tell me where latestFpgaImage was located in the program file but that information is easily available from objdump:
skip@dell-790:~/pano/working/pano_progfpga$ objdump -h progfpga | grep "\.data
24 .data 001796d4 08143c00 08143c00 000fbc00 2**5*
Knowing this we can calculate that we need to patch offset 0x8143c40 - 0x08143c00 + 0x000fbc00 in the program file.
All that remained was writing a program to update the updater with a new image.
Link to other Panologic information can be found here
- This project has been featured on Hackaday !
- If you build/use/modify this project I'd enjoy hearing about it. You can find my email address in the git log.