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Xilinx FPGA Board for Arduino
- duskwuff 7y agoA little weird to design this board as an Arduino shield when both of the parts on the board (the FPGA and the ESP32) are dramatically more powerful than the microcontroller on the host Arduino board.
- jackyinger 7y agoI suppose you could use the aurdino as a management controller for the others, but yeah you’ve got a point.
- fargle 7y agoI think the point is that the FPGA can handle very high speed IO in hardware, the ESP32 can host the application software and handle the communications. The Arduino provides power supply and maybe low-speed peripherals like GPIO... (sarc) Still awesome feature set and price point. I'm seriously thinking about using this standalone.
- duskwuff 7y agoWell... medium speed I/O. "High speed" in an FPGA context would imply a 5+ Gbit SERDES, which the Spartan-7 doesn't have and the connectors on this board wouldn't support anyway.
- ur-whale 7y agoThink of it as an ESP32 + FPGA with the arduino as a bag on the side providing features not available to the other two (e.g. power, standardized IDE, etc...)
- ohples 7y agoIt's for blog cred https://xkcd.com/730/ https://xkcd.com/730/
- seabird 7y agoI don't understand why people believe that the "year of the maker FPGA" is ever going to happen. An FPGA is by its very nature a technology that many embedded engineers (let alone hobbyist maker types) will never take advantage of in earnest. I'd imagine that if you're developing hardware that requires an FPGA, odds are high that you don't need or want an Arduino bolt-on.
- tnecniv 7y agoI think it's wishful thinking. I loved the class I had in undergrad where we worked with them extensively. One of my favorite projects was making Pong on an FPGA --- complete with a direct VGA output. I've yearned for a project that would let me use one again, but I just haven't found anything that requires that kind of performance.
- danharaj 7y agoI bought a virtex 5 board to fuck around with just a few weeks ago. I probably won't do much at all with it that I couldn't do with a boring old microcontroller but I'm having a blast. Maybe it truly is the year.
- gen3 7y agoHonestly, I see benefits. For one, I have done dev work in higher level languages since I started. Learning and practicing bit level operations has been super interesting, and a great experience. I've gotten pretty good at FSM's, had to learn pipe-lining, and now have an overall better grasp of how the computer I'm writing for actually works. I think the challenge, along with the promise of low latency is what attracts people.
- bb88 7y agoRight now, the homebrew electronics industry is buzzing like linux and open source was in 1996. PCB design and manufacturing has been opened up to millions by cost reductions and open source software in the past few years. FPGA development is following suit as well. One of the big drawbacks of using an Arduino is that it is so limited in the number of modern devices it can access (USB 3, SATA, HDMI In or Out, etc). To that end I think LiteX maybe the most intriguing thing I've seen this year if it catches on popularity. It's an SoC builder, which would allow for DIY SoC's (including using a RISC V core). https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litex https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litex I'm not saying it's guaranteed, but it's looking more and more possible that FPGA's using LiteX or similar technology could disrupt the embedded micro controller market particularly for the homebrew market. You can choose the CPU you want to code for with the interfaces you're using. Also check out the current supported litex FPGA platforms: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XTHfdYXuvwoYdPXm4M6qDA0D2fZCPy220-9q6qZpTw4/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XTHfdYXuvwoYdPXm4M6q...
- Crosseye_Jack 7y agoMeh 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 https://youtube.com/watch?v=swVuqG9-H0E [1] https://github.com/github/dmca/search?utf8=&q=Xilinx&type= https://github.com/github/dmca/search?utf8=&q=Xilinx&type=
- bb88 7y agoDoesn't seem to have stopped Symbiflow from supporting Xilinx-7 parts. https://symbiflow.github.io/ https://symbiflow.github.io/
- Crosseye_Jack 7y agoWho 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.
- bb88 7y agoI 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.
- alexisread 7y agoIt'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-open-source-hardware-feather-compatible-lattice-ecp5-fpga-board/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/08/28/orangecrab-is-an-ope...
- oytis 7y agoIn 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.
- DoingIsLearning 7y agoAs 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.
- oytis 7y agoicestudio 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.
- panpanna 7y agoI 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.
- eyegor 7y agoCan 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/examples/03ADC_AND_DAC/03ADC_AND_DAC.ino https://github.com/sea-s7/spartan-edge-ioex/blob/master/exam...
- MisterTea 7y agoThe 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.
- IshKebab 7y agoI think latency is their killer feature.
- rowanG077 7y agoYeah this seems pretty useless to me. Controlling pins on an FPGA from a microcontroller... Why not just control the pins on the microcontroller directly?
- bArray 7y agoI've been hearing about FPGAs for the last few years or so, what would be the benefit to using one over something like a Raspberry Pi? What's the killer application?
- alexhutcheson 7y agoFPGAs have high-end and low-end uses: - Low-end: I'm designing a board, and I have one place where I need a little bit of digital logic, but putting a sufficiently capable microcontroller would be too expensive (in money or power budget), and there's no easily available cheap ASIC that does what I need. I put a small low-end FPGA in, and write a little bit of HDL to implement the logic I need. - High end: I have a very specific computation that I want to perform with very low latency or high throughput, and I've determined that I can design digital logic that will perform better than a general purpose processor (often via massive parallelism that wouldn't work well on a GPU for some reason and/or extremely deep pipelining beyond what a CPU would do). Because performance is so important to me, I'm willing to pay a massive up-front development cost for the digital logic that lives on the FPGA and the software that integrates with it. However, my expected volume is still low enough that getting an ASIC made would be too expensive for my budget. Examples here include packet filtering, bioinformatics, various forms of signal processing, etc. I'll choose a high-end FPGA that meets the specific needs of my application. - Extremely high end: Same as the above, but I expect to continue to make improvements and incremental changes to the digital logic after it's been deployed. Alternatively, I'm selling my board to customers who will employ their own hardware engineers to add their own digital logic to my high-level design. I'll probably choose a very high-end FPGA that exceeds my current needs to allow space for future changes. None of the above are likely to apply to hobbyists, so most hobbyists who are developing for FPGAs are likely doing so just because they find it very interesting. The development process is much slower than it is if you're writing code for an ARM chip, and the tools are much more cumbersome, but the process of designing digital logic systems and then having a way to actually implement them can be interesting.
- bArray 7y agoThank you for your explanation. I guess your last point is why I thought I was missing something: > None of the above are likely to apply to hobbyists, so most > hobbyists who are developing for FPGAs are likely doing so > just because they find it very interesting. I see posts on HackerDay about FPGAs and think: "What am I missing?". I build robots as part of a hobby and was wondering where on earth they fit into that pipeline. Most of the things I build are either already solved within a single chip, or are easily solved with the addition of a small micro. Developing something using a HDL would be too extreme, even for me. One thing that I think might be of interest in the future is when the cell count is such that we can process large neural networks, although I suspect they might always lag behind GPUs and/or TPUs.