I know, I know - this question gets asked regularly and the answer is always "no". But, with Covid and the switch to on-line classes (possibly for the next year), having a Macintosh option to program an FPGA board may mean the difference between our university using FPGA boards in our large digital design courses or not. So, it has moved up on the importance list drastically recently.
Is anyone aware of any way to program a board (Basys 3 for example), from a Mac? We are limping along having the 10-20% of our students who run on a Mac install a Linux VM this term, but it doesn't look like a good long term solution due to a variety of issues that they regularly run into (think 120 sophomores who know very little about computers).
Lacking a known way to program an FPGA, we are investigating writing our own. Can anyone point us to documentation on the protocol needed to talk to the USB interface chip as well as other info needed to write such a tool? It would be worth a fair amount to us to write such a tool (even if it was absolutely minimal). We know bitstreams inside and out but are trying to bootstrap the rest of the process..
Ideas appreciated.
Brent Nelson
Brigham Young University