How am I supposed to get lattice diamond?

[dlow]

ARGGGGG!! Just in case anyone comes across this thread in the future, the website does not appear to work with google accounts (gmail or g-suite). I just tried with hotmail and it worked fine! 

There is no approval process. It's instantaneous. Given that it's an ASP, there's no way to know what's happening on the back-end. They must be doing something with information from the email that gets sent, because it also had issues with my personal domain.

Thanks for all the help guys. We can close this one out I guess.

[Elf]

I just bought a MachXO3 board and I am running into the same thing. I am kind of peeved; I thought that I would give them a try as they are "local" to me (headquarters not too far off in Portland, OR).

I wonder whether I would get any traction if I just walked in and asked. I am just sort of sad to have to toss the board and the local company and go back to Xilinx/webpack. From the thread it seems like it is time to go play whack-a-mole with e-mail addresses and company names? Three Four so far for me and no luck.

Here is a question, are there any FPGAs where the tool chain:

• Is proprietary but freely available, preferably not terrible, and most importantly doesn't require juggling licenses?
• Has a viable open source equivalent approaching the maturity of AVR / ARM tool chains?

I see the mention for iCE40 below with the icestorm tools; any others? No need for any fancy IP core support or anything like that, just uncooked logic.

[Dubbie]

In my experience the Lattice is definitely worth it if you can get past the ridiculous barriers to retrieving the software.

[Elf]

In my experience the Lattice is definitely worth it if you can get past the ridiculous barriers to retrieving the software.

I am going to try over the next week to obtain it; I sort of have a soft spot for them and their actual hardware products seem decent.

I've tried my personal domain, an outlook.com address, and even my work e-mail so far. No luck on any of them. I will probably even call or ask around town to see if I know someone that knows someone that works there. We'll see. Past a certain point though, if they don't want to give me the software I don't know what else to do about it. Frustrating.

They also seem to have a $99 promotion on right now for a year's worth of their full product which isn't too bad, but I don't really know how much I like the idea of paying every year to use a development environment, especially for the rather simple stuff I am trying to do. And I'm sure the 2nd year won't be anywhere near $99.

These are all for FREE SOFTWARE they are giving out.  Nothing NDA.  Nothing needing to be paid for.  Just PUBLIC FREE SOFTWARE needed to use the devices which they actively promote to student / education / maker uses in all cases.
[...]
Any company this stupid with public user experience should just go out of business.  I mean it is great they have low cost dev tools or free software for hobby / learning / whatever purposes but if they make it so unusable then what is the point?

This is what boggles me. Talk about a bad first experience. It's almost like they don't even want people to use their products.

If I were a high volume commercial buyer I am sure I would have a sales rep to smooth the way. Electronics isn't what I do professionally, but even so, for the stuff I do get to make or influence procurement decisions on, I usually don't start out by just talking to sales and waving around the idea of a lucrative contract. I find it's nice to get an idea of the product informally first and have a look around before I get the full demo from a sales droid and the endless followup calls, or to have to deal with expensing or procurement processes for something I'm just sampling. I have to imagine it isn't just hobbyists that are put off by this sort of a thing. Why even build license management into a free evaluation product? How does that benefit anybody?

Speaking of which I just took another look at Altera Quartus again for the first time since they were bought by Intel. It says "free, no license file required." I will probably download it tomorrow and see. The MAX 10 line looks decent.

[ali_asadzadeh]

They invented torrents for us for these reasons!

[mikeselectricstuff]

I think these sites have a contest with each other as to who can "raise the bar" to make access to basic functionality, information, and software as difficult as humanly possible.

These are all for FREE SOFTWARE they are giving out.  Nothing NDA.  Nothing needing to be paid for.  Just PUBLIC FREE SOFTWARE needed to use the devices which they actively promote to student / education / maker uses in all cases.

As FPGA software comprises parts from multiple vendors, I suspect Lattice have to pay some of them based on number of users, so that may be one reason they make it less than trivial.
It may also be the case that there may be some issues around verification for export control.

And if the licensing fairies favor you and it somehow actually works you must hope that you never need to update / replace your OS or HDD or PC since I think you have only maybe 1 or 2 chances per 1.5 years or so to change your license to another PC for their FREE SOFTWARE. 

So forget about running a copy on your laptop and another on a desktop and then maybe trying some higher performance computer if your experimental one is too slow to handle the bloat of the tools since it is all node locked to that one original OS/PC for zero reason with the free version!

MAC Spoofing can often be used to overcome this issue.

It might be worth talking to one of their distributors, as they will probably have contacts that can get things moving.

[mikeselectricstuff]

They invented torrents for us for these reasons!

Except they email you the license info.

[ebclr]

What kind of problems are you experiencing?

I don't know if I'm a lucky person, but Intel ( ex altera ) and lattice diamond software free or evaluations, are very simple to get and easy to install from Altera / Lattice, it's a question of a registration or log in if you already have one account and everything runs just fine, sometimes. In a matter of minutes is everything up and running, What is the point here?

[mikeselectricstuff]

AFAICS some people are having trouble registering an account with no obvious explanation.

[Elf]

For those that may have the same issue, I had some luck mailing Lattice's webmaster@ address. They said:

There was an error in our account processing that delayed the full activation of your account.
The problem has been resolved and you should now be able to access all site resources, including software downloads and licensing.

After that I was able to log in with the original sign-up address and download an automatically generated license.

I also had luck downloading Altera Quartus from Intel with just an e-mail verified signup, so that wasn't too bad. 12GB install size, but at least it doesn't seem to have any crazy DRM scheme like was mentioned above with Xilinx. Ordered some Altera dev boards as well.

[suicidaleggroll]

at least it doesn't seem to have any crazy DRM scheme like was mentioned above with Xilinx.

I've used Xilinx boards, ICs, and dev tools for many years.  I honestly have no idea what that other poster was talking about...you download one Webpack license and you're done.  It can be copied to any other computer without issue, and there is no hardware restriction.  When you get into the very powerful chips that can't use the Webpack license then things get more complicated, but AFAIK it's no different with the other manufacturers either.

[Axk]

From my experience it looks like they have some sort of additional manual account validation depending on the info you enter and (thought less likely) the IP address you register from.

So if the info you entered is fine with the automatic validation you can download the software and get a free licence right away, otherwise your account is flagged for manual validation.

As to the software itself it's not difficult to get started. At least for a LED blinking Hello World with XO2-1200 it was pretty straight forward to get it to work with a Chinese cable from Ebay (HW-USBN-2A) and my own simple dev board that I laid out to see if I get it all right and can use the XO2s in other designs.