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Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

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Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#41

Post by seabird »

bb88 wrote: post #35
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…

Is that because the FPGA boards aren't really mass produced like the RPi is? Could you imagine a world where if FPGA's get popular in the electronics market it could change? Could you imagine what might happen if a cheap FPGA platform came in to the market like the RPi did for SBC's? Again, I'm not saying it's going to happen. But people were making similar arguments about linux in 1996: "Windows just works." And ver…

It's largely because an FPGA is inferior to a microcontroller in many common use cases; they truly are a niche tool. They are nowhere near as flexible as a microcontroller is, and reprogramming them for a different purpose is a huge investment from a development standpoint. When you try to alleviate these issues by pre-canning a microcontroller with configurable peripherals, the resulting FPGA configuration will get trounced by a microcontroller in both performance AND ease-of-use.

Don't get me wrong, I really like FPGAs. I genuinely think they're the coolest tools in embedded engineering, full stop. However, a big part of the allure is how incredibly arcane and niche they are.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#42

Post by alexhutcheson »

skybrian wrote: post #39
alexhutcheson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to do your development on the Raspberry Pi, and I wouldn't recommend doing so. It's pretty easy to develop code on your desktop and push it to your Pi via SSH/SCP/etc. You might also be able to set up a connection to push via USB but that might end up being more complicated anyway. For many projects, people choose something higher-end than an Arduino because their project requires more compute or memor…

Yeah, I meant that more genetically as something that works with the Arduino IDE, certainly not an 8-bit processor. I'm considering a higher-end Teensy or PocketBeagle. Does Raspberry Pi have any particular advantages for audio compared to them?

Not that I know of, unless you plan to use the Raspberry Pi’s HDMI port for audio output.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#43

Post by skybrian »

seabird wrote: post #21
skybrian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Oh sure, I don't know why anyone would start with an 8-bit Arduino considering that much faster 32-bit CPU's seem to be about the same price?

Whatever you go with, as a beginner you're going to want a lot of help from pre-written software. The Arduino IDE and Wiring/Arduino standard API is a good example. The mistake I made with my first purchase was not making sure that a good audio library was available for the hardware I picked. (I might consider writing one for fun, but not in C++ since I don't have much experience in that language.) But it looks like Teensy has a nice audio library, and there are other projects that look intriguing like Bela and Axoloti.

I expect (speculating) that a similar rule would apply for an FPGA; it would only be appealing to most beginners if someone more experienced came up with an interesting design that makes use of an FPGA and documented it pretty well, so you're not starting from scratch.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#44

Post by rowanG077 »

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…

Yeah this seems pretty useless to me. Controlling pins on an FPGA from a microcontroller... Why not just control the pins on the microcontroller directly?

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#45

Post by rowanG077 »

seabird wrote: post #41
bb88 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that because the FPGA boards aren't really mass produced like the RPi is? Could you imagine a world where if FPGA's get popular in the electronics market it could change? Could you imagine what might happen if a cheap FPGA platform came in to the market like the RPi did for SBC's? Again, I'm not saying it's going to happen. But people were making similar arguments about linux in 1996: "Windows just works." And ver…

It's largely because an FPGA is inferior to a microcontroller in many common use cases; they truly are a niche tool. They are nowhere near as flexible as a microcontroller is, and reprogramming them for a different purpose is a huge investment from a development standpoint. When you try to alleviate these issues by pre-canning a microcontroller with configurable peripherals, the resulting FPGA configuration will get…

FPGA are WAY more flexible then a microcontroller is. You can literally just use your FPGA as a microcontroller if you want.

Reprogramming them is not a chore at all anymore since you can write stuff for them at a much higher level of abstraction then you can for microcontrollers. Complexity only really starts once you start having issues with timing closure or are forced to implement an DDR SDRAM controller. This all heavily depends on the toolset you are using.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#46

Post by oytis »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #29
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.

icestudio or Xilinx?

I'm playing with Zynq right now, and the tooling (Vivado + Xilinx SDK) is, yes, quite unstable and not always intuitive, but I can't imagine using anything else with such a device, just because of the amount of domain knowledge buried in this bunch of TCL scripts.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#47

Post by bb88 »

seabird wrote: post #41
bb88 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that because the FPGA boards aren't really mass produced like the RPi is? Could you imagine a world where if FPGA's get popular in the electronics market it could change? Could you imagine what might happen if a cheap FPGA platform came in to the market like the RPi did for SBC's? Again, I'm not saying it's going to happen. But people were making similar arguments about linux in 1996: "Windows just works." And ver…

It's largely because an FPGA is inferior to a microcontroller in many common use cases; they truly are a niche tool. They are nowhere near as flexible as a microcontroller is, and reprogramming them for a different purpose is a huge investment from a development standpoint. When you try to alleviate these issues by pre-canning a microcontroller with configurable peripherals, the resulting FPGA configuration will get…

>> They are nowhere near as flexible as a microcontroller is, and reprogramming them for a different purpose is a huge investment from a development standpoint.

Isn't that the point of LiteX and Migen though? To reduce the barrier to entry in time and budget? Before the RPi came along SBC's were fairly expensive, and the RPi was only able to offer a product at that price because of scale.

And here we have an FPGA based video processing platform for only $350 produced in low-volume. https://hdmi2usb.tv/numato-opsis/

I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't think your argument is as much of a slam-dunk that you think it is.

Re: Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino

#48

Post by bb88 »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #16
bb88 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem to have stopped Symbiflow from supporting Xilinx-7 parts. https://symbiflow.github.io/

Who Xilinx choose to set their lawyers on is up to Xilinx. They promised to clam down and update their policies after the education video takedown blew up in their face back in January, but they have yet to do update their policies so as far as I can see from their legal page (which is where they said they would post the updated policy). As the saying goes. Once bitten, twice shy.

I think you have an excellent point. Why bother with a company if they sick their lawyers on hobbyists and experimenters?

With CPU's the modern software engineer expects a new GCC/LLVM target, so we can have a consistent experience with one code base.

I get that.

I believe the market is shifting under the FPGA's faster than they realize. Sure they're going to have large corporate customers for a while using the xilinx proprietary IP cores, etc. But someone at some company is going to get a bonus for saving the company tons of money by modifying an open source core, so they can drop the cost of using the xilinx proprietary cores.

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