Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#2I used the Altera DE1 in my college EE class a few years ago and am interested in getting back into writing VHDL to help learn more about reverse engineering on a hardware level.
Should I go ahead and get the DE1-SoC since I already have experience with Quartus II or should I go for one of the Spartans (which I know nothing about). If I go with Altera is a DE2 worth the investment (it's 2x the price)?
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#3I wish I knew what this person was using them for :-)
Has anyone made a similar comparative study of my biggest gripe with FPGAs: the quality of the (more or less mandatory) development software? In my experience, it's pretty horrendously terrible :(
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#4I strongly recommend Cypress PSoC3 and PSoC5 if your budget is tight and you want to achieve the blazing fast speed of FPGA within a tight budget. I implemented Wavelet Transform with de-noising scheme, a classifier model to match against that Wavelet Transform, and a RMS machine, all in hardware, all in that small PSoC3 chip. Magic.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#5I wish I knew what this person was using them for :-) Has anyone made a similar comparative study of my biggest gripe with FPGAs: the quality of the (more or less mandatory) development software? In my experience, it's pretty horrendously terrible :(
(Sorry for the down vote, meant to up vote; HN UI is prone to misclicks especially from mobile users)
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#6I wish I knew what this person was using them for :-) Has anyone made a similar comparative study of my biggest gripe with FPGAs: the quality of the (more or less mandatory) development software? In my experience, it's pretty horrendously terrible :(
(Sorry for the down vote, meant to up vote; HN UI is prone to misclicks especially from mobile users)
I neutralized yours, no worries.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#7I got interested in FPGAs a few years ago out of a desire to design a toy processor for a Coursera class. I had a similar issue figuring out what board(s) to get, mostly because I didn't know what the number of gates could actually implement. I too ended up with an Atlys board, which is an impressive little beast.
When it came to learning an HDL, I got in contact with several people who worked on FPGAs and learned that most of the experience people seemed to be gaining is how to navigate the development environments. Each FPGA manufacturer has their own environment that only works for their own chips and only supports their own (or partner's) JTAG controllers. Each development environment is completely different and often a design-by-committee mess to navigate, let alone use.
So I continued like most in the direction of my first purchase and messed with Xilinx ISE. I could write pages about this tool (Doesn't support spaces in installation path, 15 gigabyte install, matlab-level licensing even for the free version, on linux first command to run before you use ISE is source settings64.sh, etc.).
Above all that, my primary issue is that while the synthesizing/place-and-route (FPGA form of compiling) work on linux, in the newer versions of ISE that no longer require broken kernel drivers, they incorrectly load libusb, so you have to LD_PRELOAD the library, and even then it only seems to correctly load a third of the time.
(shameless plug time)
I don't think anyone else should have to deal with this crap. I called BS, and started a project I (for now) call "Adapt" to make a tool that runs on all POSIX systems to be able to support all FPGA chips and all JTAG controllers with an easily-extensible code base.
Do note that this project does not synthesize or route for chips, only load the bit files onto the chips. Other work is being done on that.
I am currently working on re-implementing some JTAG controller firmware so the tool can be distributed without proprietary software, and after that I will get back to the core of the project, add testing, and finish the ability to support multiple chips.
http://diamondman.github.io/Adapt/
This project is very much in progress so this is just a heads up for now. However if anyone would like to contribute support for their favorite controller or chip, it would be greatly appreciated.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#8My problem with FPGA is two fold - I have no idea what to use them for and I have no idea how to use them.
Yet with all these mentions here I fear that I may become unemployable as a software developer if I don't keep up.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#9I got interested in FPGAs a few years ago out of a desire to design a toy processor for a Coursera class. I had a similar issue figuring out what board(s) to get, mostly because I didn't know what the number of gates could actually implement. I too ended up with an Atlys board, which is an impressive little beast. When it came to learning an HDL, I got in contact with several people who worked on FPGAs and learned th…
What Coursera class did you take that implement toy processor?
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
#10My problem with FPGA is two fold - I have no idea what to use them for and I have no idea how to use them. Yet with all these mentions here I fear that I may become unemployable as a software developer if I don't keep up.
I worked w/ FPGAs exclusively for 5 years and still don't have many ideas for using them. (In other words, small ARM computers running Linux are more exciting. And low-power boards like the JeeNode etc)
Actually an interesting arch for me would be small FPGAs together w/ an ARM system, where the FPGA would handle the fast interrupts, buffering things, and communicate w/ the processor when its ready.