lighthouse-4 deck doesn't work properly

[josevtecc]

Hi everyone,

We're trying to use the Lighthouse deck from Bitcraze to obtain the position of the deck using two SteamVR Base Station 2.0 lighthouses. We created the route '/bitcraze/' where we installed:

• 'icestorm', 'nextpn'r, 'yosys,' and 'arachne-pnr' in independent folders.
• We also did a git pull of 'lighthouse-fpga' and 'lighthouse-bootloader'.

On lighthouse-bootloader, if we run 'make prog', an error occurs:

I didn’t understand “(vendor_id 0x0403, device_id 0x6010…)". When we check with 'lsusb', we see:

Looking at the code, we assume that the error message is programmed and it never actually tries to read the 0x6010 device ID. Also, 'make prog' doesn’t work, but we can boot the FPGA as shown here:

The red LED turns off, so booting is performed. Why doesn’t 'make prog' work?

Now, on lighthouse-fpga, if we run 'make' (before bootloading the FPGA), we get a lot of information, but an error occurs:

So, we boot the FPGA, and repeat the 'make':

The same error occurs. Do we need to place the lighthouses at a specific distance? Should they be turned on or off?

Additionally, we tried 'print_frame.py' but no progress is made beyond “waiting for sync…”

We are using an FTDI cable chip USB to UART (ref. TTL-232RG-VSW5V-WE), where we connect:

• Red 5V to Vcom on the lighthouse-deck
• Black GND to GND on the lighthouse-deck
• Yellow Rx to Tx on the lighthouse-deck
• Orange Tx through an 8.5K ohm resistor divider to Rx on the lighthouse-deck

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you very much.

[ataffanel]

Hi,

If all you want is to use the deck, you do not need to recompile the FPGA bitstream, you can use the releases bitstreams and use the bootloader. Programming the FPGA via SPI requires populating jumpers on the board, this is not needed as long as you can access the bootloader.

You can find the latest bitstream in the release page: https://github.com/bitcraze/lighthouse-fpga/releases. You can write it using the bootloader script and then there should be a data stream comming on the serial port.

Your cabling seems correct, it is very good that you put a voltage divider to protect the board.

[ataffanel]

The data sent on the UART are binary data, so they will not be clear text on a terminal. Though the fact that you see data is a good sign, it means that if you use one of the script on the UART at 115KBaud, you should get pulse information.

[josevtecc]

That's an example of the output from "picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0"

Then, when we test the code "printframe.py" the terminal shows always "Waiting for sync ..."

[knmcguire]

@josevtecc Arnaud is now out of office but we will notify him on your update next week. Sorry for the delay!

[josevtecc]

Hi, how's it going, is the output shown correct?

[ataffanel]

It shoes some output which is good, then something else might be happening. I guess the most probable is that there is a version mismatch between the deck and the script. My first intuition make sure that you are using the latest version of the FPGA bit-stream with the latest version of the receive script. Those two should work together. If not, you can try to print the values the script get in the synchronization routine to see if it looks correct.