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Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

seeedstudio.com

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Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#21

Post by seabird »

skybrian wrote: post #18
lnsru wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are ignoring price point. Small FPGA board from Digilent costs as much as Raspberry Pi 4 4 GB. Development on Raspberry Pi is much more convenient, it is powerful and it already has decent CSI-2, 4K HDMI, Ethernet. Comparable FPGA board goes for hundreds $/€. Because decent CSI-2 with high frame rate and resolution as well as 4K HDMI need decent FPGA with transceivers. Add long hardware development cycles and thi…

I'm just getting started on electronics for an audio project, but the Arduino setup of compiling code on my regular computer and uploading it over USB to firmware seems pretty nice? Since I'm never going to connect it to the Internet or even a monitor, why does Ethernet or HDMI matter? Let alone 4K HDMI. It seems like that's more about having a cheap desktop computer than doing electronics? But I already have a deskt…

If you're going to do serious audio signals processing, you're probably going to very quickly find out that an 8bit Arduino and the Arduino environment are nowhere near powerful enough for your needs. If you really stick with it, you'll upgrade to something significantly more powerful (both hardware and tooling wise). If you start to push the limits of a 32bit microcontroller or DSP, but are still sensitive to price/power consumption/footprint/etc, then you will truly understand what the need for an FPGA is. That's my point; you as an embedded beginner (which is what most of the "maker" market is) are multiple revelations away from even beginning to understand why you would want to use an FPGA, let alone know how to work with one.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#22

Post by alexisread »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #12

Meh it’s a Xilinx part. They are too lawyer heavy for my liking, issuing takedowns on educational vids [0] and file DMCA takedowns of reverse engineering [1] [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=swVuqG9-H0E [1] https://github.com/github/dmca/search?utf8=&q=Xilinx&type=

It's not quite ready yet, but the Orangecrab looks really exciting- 85K LUTs, all IO broken out, feather form factor, 8gb RAM, Lipo connector, open source toolchain.

There are enough gates to do some interesting stuff without it getting overwhelming, and you can run a RiscV softcore.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/08/28/orangecrab-is-an-ope...

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#24

Post by panpanna »

I wish they had used something like the lattice ice40.

It's better to have a slitghly worse hardware that you can actually program and use than something that requites the poster child of horrible proprietary software.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#25

Post by eyegor »

Can someone explain the appeal of this to me? I love playing with fpgas but if you're not working in an hdl then what is the value? Typically you'd use an fpga as a dev tool to design an asic or maybe even use the fpga outright if it's fast enough at your task to make it worthwhile. By issuing commands via arduino scratch code, you toss all practical value out the window as far as I can tell.

Looking at their example code it just seems so far removed from hardware that I am stuck scratching my head: https://github.com/sea-s7/spartan-edge-ioex/blob/master/exam...

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#26

Post by dooglius »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #12

Meh it’s a Xilinx part. They are too lawyer heavy for my liking, issuing takedowns on educational vids [0] and file DMCA takedowns of reverse engineering [1] [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=swVuqG9-H0E [1] https://github.com/github/dmca/search?utf8=&q=Xilinx&type=

I looked at the DCMA takedowns and they were all for either license files, or encryption keys. I'm not sure what you expect a company that sells software to do in these circumstances. This very different from the sort of reverse engineering that e.g. project X-Ray is doing.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#27

Post by MisterTea »

eyegor wrote: post #25

Can someone explain the appeal of this to me? I love playing with fpgas but if you're not working in an hdl then what is the value? Typically you'd use an fpga as a dev tool to design an asic or maybe even use the fpga outright if it's fast enough at your task to make it worthwhile. By issuing commands via arduino scratch code, you toss all practical value out the window as far as I can tell. Looking at their example…

The project isn't finished yet.

> Typically you'd use an fpga as a dev tool to design an asic or maybe even use the fpga outright if it's fast enough at your task to make it worthwhile.

No way. FPGA's are extremely useful for low volume alternative to asics or tasks where the logic may have to change according to end use cases. They are found everywhere you need a quick bit of complex logic and don't want an asic or need some extreme form of flexibility.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#28

Post by IshKebab »

eyegor wrote: post #25

Can someone explain the appeal of this to me? I love playing with fpgas but if you're not working in an hdl then what is the value? Typically you'd use an fpga as a dev tool to design an asic or maybe even use the fpga outright if it's fast enough at your task to make it worthwhile. By issuing commands via arduino scratch code, you toss all practical value out the window as far as I can tell. Looking at their example…

I think latency is their killer feature.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#29

Post by DoingIsLearning »

oytis wrote: post #23

In the spirit of Arduino it should come with some simple visual HDL language for FPGA dataflow. Like icestudio.io, maybe with more high-level blocks.

As someone who has had to walk through broken glass with Xilinx toolchain I can garantee that you do not want any tool/utility created or 'maintained' by this company.
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