pyVME

This package uses exposed cpp functions using pybind11 to use the VMEbus (Versa Module Eurocard-bus) to interact with FPGAs. The shared object used for this was compiled on a 64bit Linux machine and supports no other platforms.

It is intended for the use at ELSA (University of Bonn) and can be used for many elegant implementations of different tools.

The main functionality comes from a shared object (.so) that ships as a binary blob within this package.

Table of Contents

1. Requierements
2. Installation
3. Building from source

Requierements:

This package needs to be run on a Linux 64bit machine with python >= 3.9 installed

Installation

This package is available via pypi and can be simply installed by running:

pip install pyVME

Features

After installation (e.g. pip install pyVME) you can import this package into your projects via import pyVME.

This gives you access to the three classes that come within this package, returns ```

1. pyVME.fpga(baseaddr): Allows you to instantiate one FPGA that is directly connected to the CPU your python program is running on
2. pyVME.server(int server_port): Allows you to run a server on a remote machine that is connected with one or more FPGAs. It will instantiate for each FPGA defined by the client a new instance.
3. pyVME.remoteFPGA(int baseaddr, string server_ip, int server_port): Allows you to connect to a running server and call functions of the remote FPGA instances.

Every class has the same set of functions that act differently in the background without the user having to change anything.

Functions

The following functions are supported:

• readRegisters(int register), returns str
• writeRegisters(int register, int value), returns str
• load_fpga(string file_path), returns bool
• load_fpga_xml(string file_path), returns bool
• load_fpga_if_new(string file_path), returns bool
• load_fpga_if_new_xml(string file_path), returns bool
• load_fpga_from_flash(string file_path), returns bool
• async_load_fpga_from_flash(string file_path), returns str
• swap_bits(int inputbits), returns str
• getBaseaddress(), returns int
• getModulePCIBaseAdress(), returns int
• getBoardID(), returns int
• getBoardType(), returns int
• getFirmwareVersion(), returns int
• getFirmwareType(), returns int
• getInterfaceVersion(), returns int
• getMezzanineType()s, returns int
• getFPGADone(), returns int
• wait_on_fpga_done(), returns str

Examples

Server:

import pyVME as vme
server = vme.server(port=5555)
server.run()

remote FPGA:

import pyVME as vme
fpga = vme.remoteFPGA(baseaddr=0xAB000000, server_ip='remote_ip/domain', server_port=5555)

local FPGA:

import pyVME as vme
fpga = vme.fpga(baseaddr=0xAB000000)

Source Code

This project is only partially open source because it comes with a binary blob in form of a shared object (the source code for the .so is accessable for members of the HISKP only on the HISKP Gitlab). The source code can be found at pyVME.

Building from source

To build this package you need to have the build package installed:

pip install build

No other packages are requiered. You can simply build this package by running:

python3 -m build

in the root directory of this repository.

It will automatically generate a distfolder with the contents pyVME-X.X.X-py3-none-any.whl and pyVME-X.X.X.tar.gz.

You can install the build package by running

pip install ./dist/pyVME-X.X.X-py3-none-any.whl

or

pip install ./dist/pyVME-X.X.X.tar.gz