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Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

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Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#41

Post by idiotsecant »

Cyao wrote: post #28
kriro wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't offer them too cheaply. Typically you want to roughly sell for 4x your buy price. 200 seems good and there should be plenty demand at that price. Great work. I'll look into this after my vacation as it seems quite interesting for our university courses.

Can I ask your reasoning about not selling them too cheaply? I would like to sell them cheaper then the existing boards since the price prevented me from buying one when I was 13

What's your goal? Do you primarily want to help other people get gear cheaply or do you primarily want to be rewarded for your work?

Either is fine, but it's important to have a least a few of the latter, a person has got to eat.

Also consider that it will feel like you're doing a good thing at first, but once you have some units get lost in the mail, users try to scam you for free units, etc it will feel a lot more like a job! You will have an obligation that all of a sudden you're not being paid for at all.

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#42

Post by utopcell »

lukevp wrote: post #10
Cyao wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the amount of emails i got asking if i sell the boards, I just applied to crowdsupply :P

I have no idea about this product category but am interested in learning more about FPGAs. What is the ballpark price point that something like this would be? Are we talking $100 or $1000?

$25 - $35 on Amazon, quantity 1, just search for "tang nano" or "tang primer".

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#43

Post by utopcell »

This looks like a great project, a fun toy to play with.

However, stating that:

> I've always wanted a low-cost portable FPGA with video output to make my own CPU, but there isn't any on the market.

is definitely not true: one can buy Sipeed's Tang Nano boards for $25+ on Amazon (or less if one needs fewer than 20k LUTs).

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#44

Post by utopcell »

The FPGA used seems to be quite popular in the hobbyist community. If you don't care about the form factor, there exist relatively cheap high-volume ECP5-based boards that have been repurposed to be general FPGA dev boards [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Price-Colorlight-5A-75B-Screen-Receiv...

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#45

Post by [deleted] »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #16

I checked out his post on Reddit [0]. OP (cyao12) wrote a CPU in Verilog at the age of 13 and is now only 16. Mind. Blown. cyao12: I'm going to try and put the old cpu I made in verilog when I was 13 on it! The sdram is okay, the traces are short enough that the distance difference doesn't matter :D Collez_boi: You made a freaking CPU in Verilog when you were 13?! That's crazy. cyao12: Yeaaah, but tbh the design wasn…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#46

Post by jwrallie »

kriro wrote: post #27
Cyao wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at bulk 40-50$! My dev batch of 5 comes out at around 70$ per board, but it has a large startup cost.

Don't offer them too cheaply. Typically you want to roughly sell for 4x your buy price. 200 seems good and there should be plenty demand at that price. Great work. I'll look into this after my vacation as it seems quite interesting for our university courses.

That’s good advice. You need to see the costs that are not so obvious including your own time.

You might as well profit a bit in exchange of the extra work and to cover some losses as others mentioned.

Eventually if demand is sustained, you will see clones pop up on AliExpress or the likes of it very cheap anyway. The design is open source after all, and this is plenty of generosity already.

You can consider making a discount if someone ask for it with a university email or something.

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#47

Post by Cyao »

utopcell wrote: post #43

This looks like a great project, a fun toy to play with. However, stating that: > I've always wanted a low-cost portable FPGA with video output to make my own CPU, but there isn't any on the market. is definitely not true: one can buy Sipeed's Tang Nano boards for $25+ on Amazon (or less if one needs fewer than 20k LUTs).

Oh that's nice, how come I never saw those!

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#48

Post by robinsonb5 »

utopcell wrote: post #44

The FPGA used seems to be quite popular in the hobbyist community. If you don't care about the form factor, there exist relatively cheap high-volume ECP5-based boards that have been repurposed to be general FPGA dev boards [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Price-Colorlight-5A-75B-Screen-Receiv...

The only downside of those is that the SDRAM chip is wired with its DQM pins tied low, which means you can't do byte writes to SDRAM - you have to write a full word at a time. That makes it much harder to port existing cores to the ColorLight boards.

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#49

Post by robinsonb5 »

Cyao wrote: post #47
utopcell wrote: post #43

This looks like a great project, a fun toy to play with. However, stating that: > I've always wanted a low-cost portable FPGA with video output to make my own CPU, but there isn't any on the market. is definitely not true: one can buy Sipeed's Tang Nano boards for $25+ on Amazon (or less if one needs fewer than 20k LUTs).

Oh that's nice, how come I never saw those!

The Gowin chips are quite interesting - they have RAM built in to the FPGA itself. It's SDRAM in the case of the Tang Nano 20k. It's a 32-bit wide RAM, but unfortunately only 8 megabytes, which is a bit limiting. The FPGA's clocking is a bit limited, too. (For that reason, there's an extra clock generator on the Tang Nano 20k.)

Re: Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent

#50

Post by robinsonb5 »

nebula8804 wrote: post #11

What is this FPGA capable of? Can any of the cores of the MISter cores be ported over to this?

I recently got a build of the Minimig Amiga core running on IceSugarPro (which has the same FPGA and same size SDRAM) - only the ECS chipset (no AGA) but I did get RTG graphics working at 1280x720x16bit. It uses PS/2 rather than USB for keyboard and mouse, but apart from that it would be trivial to port to this new board.
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