the guide · 1How do you run CS223 labs on a Mac without Vivado?

What do you need before you start?

The board. A Digilent Basys3 and its micro-USB cable. Apple Silicon MacBooks have only USB-C ports, so you also need a USB-C to USB-A adapter or hub. The board is powered from the cable; leave the JP2 jumper on USB.

The terminal. Press Cmd Space, type Terminal, press Enter. Every command in this guide goes into that window: paste it, press Enter, wait until the line ending in % comes back before you paste the next one. Some commands span several lines and end in \; copy the whole grey block at once.

Homebrew. It installs developer tools by name, and on a Mac that does not have them it first installs Apple's command line tools (git, make, the C compiler), which the chain is built with; that is the installer's own should_install_command_line_tools step. So this one line covers both:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

It asks for your Mac password; the letters do not show while you type. At the end it prints a few lines under "Next steps". Paste those into the terminal too: they put /opt/homebrew/bin on your PATH, and without them the next command answers command not found. Open a new terminal window and check:

brew --version
# Homebrew 4.x

If dewfpga install later stops with Xcode Command Line Tools missing (a Homebrew copied over by Migration Assistant, or a tools download that failed), run xcode-select --install, click Install in the window, and run it again. If it stops with Homebrew is installed (...) but not on your PATH, the "Next steps" lines were the missing part; it prints the one line that fixes it.

VS Code. Download it from code.visualstudio.com. Then in VS Code press Cmd Shift P, type shell command, choose "Install 'code' command in PATH". After that code . in the terminal opens the current folder. Do not edit these files in TextEdit; it saves rich text, and the tools cannot read that.

next: 2 How do you install it in one line?
This section in the whole guide
The commands this section names: dewfpga install

Stuck on an error? Every error from this setup, filed under the exact line it printed.