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FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

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Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#51

Post by duskwuff »

the__alchemist wrote: post #38
fpgaminer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can cause surprising problems if you don't check the dev board manual's pin table Nah, you got it all wrong. You need to pull up the devboard's Pinout, User Guide, and Overview documents. Sometimes cross reference those to the devboard's schematic for the trickier pins. Alongside the specific User Guide and Programming manuals for the MCU on the board. Plus the MCU's guides don't typically cover stuff that's com…

Those issues transcend the discovery board. It's frustrating how much the Reference Manuals leave to the imagination. A lot of the peripherals are similar or identical across families. Some have subtle differences, and some have large ones. I haven't found a shortcut - seems you really need to bring up parallel reference manuals. For example, the RTC periph is the same on most STM32 devices. Clocks vary significantly…

> For example, the RTC periph is the same on most STM32 devices.

There's actually two major versions of the RTC peripheral. :) The v1 RTC counts in seconds, v2 has explicit date/time fields.

A lot of other STM32 peripherals can be seen as "versioned" in similar ways. There's a lot of different combinations of those peripherals on different parts, but there's usually only two or three major revisions present of each peripheral across the entire product line, and they tend to follow a pretty consistent timeline. (That is, a newer part will usually use the newest version of each peripheral at the time it was designed, rather than using a mixture of old and new peripherals.)

Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#52

Post by alfiedotwtf »

vrangan wrote: post #44
victor82 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are already familiar with Python I could recommend start with this tutorial: https://github.com/RobertBaruch/nmigen-tutorial

Also, icestudio ( https://icestudio.io/ ) is a gentle way to get introduced with minimal knowledge to the verilog side of things. As others have posted, the learning curve for HW can be steep and development tools tend to be in the dark ages as compared to those for SW development. eg. you will spend a lot of time hitting your head on a wall with debugging HW if you arent careful to follow a process of linting and si…

Excellent. Thanks to you both!

Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#53

Post by MuffinFlavored »

vrangan wrote: post #19

I'm the author of the blog . Not trying to promote myself but since you posted, the v3 of the board is available on the tinyvision.ai and tindie stores. I discontinued v2 as it was a terrible design that I couldn't stand behind. There are many reasons to learn about fpga's. Yes micros have their place as well and are very capable and cheap like the Nxp RT series.

Can it run Linux? What comes close to beating the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W?

Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#54

Post by numpad0 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #53
vrangan wrote: post #19

I'm the author of the blog . Not trying to promote myself but since you posted, the v3 of the board is available on the tinyvision.ai and tindie stores. I discontinued v2 as it was a terrible design that I couldn't stand behind. There are many reasons to learn about fpga's. Yes micros have their place as well and are very capable and cheap like the Nxp RT series.

Can it run Linux? What comes close to beating the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W?

Not enough RAM. 640kB is actually enough for anyone as far as scalar variables in a single app are concerned so that’s what these small single task microcontrollers have.

Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#55

Post by gorkish »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #53
vrangan wrote: post #19

I'm the author of the blog . Not trying to promote myself but since you posted, the v3 of the board is available on the tinyvision.ai and tindie stores. I discontinued v2 as it was a terrible design that I couldn't stand behind. There are many reasons to learn about fpga's. Yes micros have their place as well and are very capable and cheap like the Nxp RT series.

Can it run Linux? What comes close to beating the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W?

It is an FPGA; it can run synchronous logic operations. This could include something like the encapsulation of an entire gate and circuit accurate simulation of an entire system of processors, memories, and interfaces, like say, a Super Nintendo (see MiSTer for more of this). This is a very different domain than a raspberry pi, and while the chip here lacks the resources to run something like MiSTer it will likely be used to run something like a microcontroller SoC with customizable peripherals. The $25 price point for everything and the kitchen sink is just right. The comparison to Arduino is much more apt than to the Pi.

Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#56

Post by analognoise »

bsder wrote: post #10
the__alchemist wrote: post #5

How does this compare to alternatives for learning FPGA? What's the significance of the duino suffix? When would you choose FPGA over something like an STM32? From what an internet search leads to, they can be faster / do more things in parallel for the price. And you can add capabilities (More timers? More op amps?) with firmware updates. Is this at the core of when you'd choose one? I've no experience with FPGA, bu…

> When would you choose FPGA over something like an STM32? The answer is "almost never". Qualifications below. Learn the Cortex-M4 ecosystem first . You can do a remarkable amount of stuff by abusing microcontroller systems in weird ways. The tools for dealing with microcontrollers are MUCH better than the FPGA ecosystem tools (which suck--and that's on a good day). If you need an FPGA, generally you know it. The fir…

100%, all the recommendations to "start" with the FOSS toolchain are totally bogus.

"You want to learn FPGAs! Let's simulate with Verilator. No, it can't simulate delays, or your vendor's IP library. No, it's not mixed language - hope all your IP is Verilog! And you'll need to know C or C++ to write your test bench, but that's ok right? The examples online involve templates (ZipCPU), so you're OK with Makefiles, and templated C++, obviously. Now, you have the FOSS P&R tools! They use a primitive simulated annealing placement algorithm that's like what we did in the 90's. Yeah, that's terrible, but don't worry, it works fine because the only parts you can target are really, really tiny Lattice parts! No, you can't even use all the hard blocks on the 7 series Xilinx parts - you can fit ONE whole RISC-V superscalar OoO core on the $3500 VC707 (https://github.com/csail-csg/riscy-OOO), running at ~120MHz - but I'll bet you'll do some primitive microcontroller RISC-V instead, something that fits on these really, really, REALLY tiny parts. Then you'll obviously want to augment that with Migen - don't you also know Python? Or Chisel! How great is Scala right? Yeah, it couldn't simulate a simple tri-state until version 2, but you're OK with the concept of domain specific languages already, right? You love the first-class functions and code as data concept! I know, I know. No, nobody in industry cares about any of this stuff, they're too busy using actual FPGA knowledge to like build real systems and circuits. Yeah, a microcontroller-level RISC-V style processor is a handful of undergraduate labs, but RISC-V IS OPEN! Anyway, back to FPGAs...hey where are you going?!"

Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#57

Post by KMag »

ncmncm wrote: post #40
qwerty456127 wrote: post #28

How about an FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple (or not really), supported by OSS toolchain and can emulate a RISC-V SoC with performance sufficient to run a fully-functional Linux desktop? I once stumbled upon an article where somebody FPGA-ed (with a much bigger board, I don't insist it has to be this small and simple) a RISC-V system to make a "RISC-V PC" and I'm thinking about getting an FPGA to explore that sin…

Crowd Supply has quite a selection of often astonishingly cheap FPGA prototype boards supported by all Free toolchains. The mother lode of cheap, capable FPGAs seems to be supply chains for makers of TVs.

Is the reason for this that smart TVs need to be able to add real-time video codecs (actually, just the decoders) on a shorter lead time than is possible with ASICs? TVs generally strike me as things where economies of scale make FPGAs look less attractive. Though, I clearly don't know much about the industry.

Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#58

Post by phendrenad2 »

osamagirl69 wrote: post #3

I love the emphasis on breaking out all of the GPIO pins, it is incredible today how many dev boards either leave pins as not connected or hard wire them (no jumper to disable) to some onboad peripheral. Looking at you stm32 discovery boards...

It's amazing how many dev boards with 300 GPIOs on the chip give you... 50 (especially looking at you, Xilinx!). At least give me a tiny little header that I can use if I'm determined enough.

Signed,

Someone who needs 200+ pins in a current design and doesn't want to make their own board from scratch.

Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain

#59

Post by MobiusHorizons »

tieze wrote: post #34
qwerty456127 wrote: post #28

How about an FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple (or not really), supported by OSS toolchain and can emulate a RISC-V SoC with performance sufficient to run a fully-functional Linux desktop? I once stumbled upon an article where somebody FPGA-ed (with a much bigger board, I don't insist it has to be this small and simple) a RISC-V system to make a "RISC-V PC" and I'm thinking about getting an FPGA to explore that sin…

Not extremely cheap, but the ULX3S fits the bill. It's got the inputs and outputs and all.

It has only 32meg of ram though, so that would likely limit you to terminal linux.
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