Are there any plans for eveloping a low-cost development board to get started with FPGA?
I'm thinking of a Spartan or Cyclone FPGA on it with some RAM, IO, FLASH and hopefully an Ethernet interface.
I don't have a specific project in mind where I would want to use it, but I would like to have a
nice board to experiment and get started with FPGA programming. something with a nice easy entry, and good
support, as we are used to with Olimex products.
Is anyone interested in this, or am I the only one? I know there are some possible boards out there,
like the pipistrello, but I just love Olimex so much ;-)
greetings,
Dave
Hi Dave
we already have two:
https://www.olimex.com/Products/Modules/Video/
both have Spartan on them and can be used as general purpose FPGA development boards too
Tsvetan
What about about a little Linux computer board like the iMX233-OLinuXino-MAXI or MICRO with a FPGA on board as well. Maybe a Spartan 6 with some RAM for the FPGA also?
That would be a very useful board!
I dont know how "low-cost" these are gonna be but i played at them during a workshop and tbh theyre really cool: A Dual Core Cortex-A9 combined with an Altera Cyclone FPGA: http://www.arrownac.com/solutions/sockit
Whats more, Linux support is in mainline and there is a Yocto layer available for these babies.
how actually did you play with them?
as on Embedded World I asked Altera and to may work with the FPGA part you need to purchase their $1500 tool
We used the Arrow version of the sockit board, the Altera version is a bit different. On the software side we used Quatro/Qsys + ARM DS 5 with Altera FPGA integration which they call SoC EDS ( https://www.altera.com/download/software/soc-eds/13.0 )
These tools have a web version with somewhat limited functionality, mainly with regards to debugging. ( see http://www.altera.com/literature/po/ss_quartussevswe.pdf )
Whats more, they also run on Linux :)
And now we have these:
https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/iCE40/