4 ms·
A programmable FPGA SoM in the tiny microSD form factor
- mattofak 2y agoThis sounds fun to play with and get feet wet in HDL, but it's only a lattice ice40, I have no idea what you'd seriously do with this. Usually ice40 are used as glue logic, or multiplexing/buffering a bunch of ADC/DAC chips so the processor can do large data transfers instead of a bunch of tiny ones. The website claims hardware acceleration and... I doubt they got timing closure on the soft CPU at anything greater than 100MHz and you still have to get data to/from it at likely 30~40 MB/s via an SDMMC bus.
- mechagodzilla 2y agoIt's got 128KB of on-die SRAM - you could have a Z80 and a 6502, both with a full complement of SRAM!
- ruslan 2y agoLattice's FPGAs are very nice. With an iCE40 you can have a full featured RISC-V soft-core (RV32IMFAC) at some 80 MHz.
- wyager 2y agoFor a lot of the iCE40 chips, it's extremely difficult to reliably get fMax > 50MHz even with extremely aggressive pipelining. I assume 80MHz is only possible on the highest-speed parts in the iCE40 family I switched a design from iCE40 to ECP5 and got a ~3x speedup "for free" Agreed that using Lattice FPGAs is super nice, mostly because you get to use the open-source Yosys toolchain, which is vastly better than proprietary toolchains IMO
- Neywiny 2y agoAgreed. Not enough processing power for anything onboard, no IO out the back (seems like a missed opportunity tbh) for expansion to do fun things. Not sure what I'd do with this. A quick search shows Hirose has a 0.5mm tall FPC connector that could fit 25 contacts within the width. Looking at their pictures, they have some spare height (unsure if enough though) and depth to move components forward. Even with good grounding, idk 12 IO is a decent amount.
- rasz 2y agoThe only use case that comes to my mind is extracting live data from device strictly recording onto SDcard, but wifi enabled SDcards designed for that purpose are already on the market since 2010 (eyefi).
- rgovostes 2y agoI think this product category is defunct. Eye-Fi ceased business in 2016. Toshiba's FlashAir and Canon's offering also disappeared around the same time.
- downrightmike 2y agoI have a Eye-Fi card that barely shows up as 8mb, when its 4GB, its useless without the cloud servers
- papichulo2023 2y agoI think it is for devices that are meant to be run for years on battery. I try to find the power consumption but no luck. If it is for that, no sure how useful are they in the age IoT and great MCU for 2 usd.
- 0xmarcin 2y agoI am a bit concerned here. I wonder how much time will pass before someone decide to use it to hack a computer?
- K0balt 2y agoThis is likely an extremely rich attack vector if you can gain any reach through the SDIO interface. That’s a big if… but because of the relative obscurity of the attack surface and requirements for unusual tools, this is probably largely unexplored territory for non-state actors. It is very likely that the firmware and drivers for SDIO are at the very least insecure and likely rife with serious arbitrary-code-execution level bugs, manufacturer / letter agency back doors for special tools, and similar attack surfaces that will suddenly become accessible to anyone with a hundred dollars and the desire to dig in. Ultimately, this will be good for device security, but the need for a specialized (but obtainable) tool to execute the attack means probably years of vulnerabilities in the wild, and won’t-fix for older devices.
- K0balt 2y agoI honestly can’t imagine why someone would downvote that lol. Sdio is exactly the kind of interface that one would use for hidden backdoors, since you need a very special piece of hardware to deliver the payload. No one will ever discover that there are undocumented features that can be accessed by a nonstandard sdio device with just the right mis-timings… because the only thing ever going in that a lot is a memory card that is incapable of producing that signal. At least until now lol.
- robotnikman 2y agoIIRC there have already been proof of concept attacks made using MicroSD cards with the microcontroller modified https://www.welivesecurity.com/2014/01/02/could-new-malware-steal-data-from-inside-your-sd-card-researchers-claim-even-solid-state-pc-drives-could-be-at-risk/ https://www.welivesecurity.com/2014/01/02/could-new-malware-...
- alnwlsn 2y agoReminds me of the old Electric Imp, which was like an ESP32 before the ESP32. Also came in a (full size) SD card form factor.
- pstmb 2y ago[dead]
- lfmunoz4 2y agoI first I thought this was a regular storage microSD with an FPGA that allows you change the data live as as it is saved or something. But seems to be an fpga that has microSD connection with no real storage capability like you would have in a reguar microSD (other than storage for fpga bitstream), i.e it is not storage device use case. But why microSD? Is it just because you can load the bitstream without having to use uart or jtag? "The Signaloid C0-microSD has two main use cases: You can either (1) use it as a hot-pluggable FPGA module, or (2) use it as a hot-pluggable Signaloid C0 RISC-V co-processor module." That is not really a use case. Use case usually gives examples of how they are used in production, i.e, more specific about applications.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoThe SD Card interface spec includes general-purpose IO in the form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SDIO_cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SDIO_cards , which has been used for plenty of things that aren't storage. As to why you'd use it here - I assume the appeal is that if you have a SD slot on your computer (which is quite common) then you can plug this in and use it with no additional hardware at all.
- lfmunoz4 2y agoIf I buy it and plug into my computer, I guess my computer will see it as a storage device. If I send it a picture, does it overwrite the fpga bitstream? Do I have write custom drivers so that it does something useful?
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoI would not expect it to show up as a storage device, no; the point of SDIO is that the SD slot is generic like a USB port. You would need software that can use the device you've plugged in just like if you plugged in a separate FPGA programmer.
- whizzter 2y ago
- utopcell 2y agoThough it is cool to see a minute FPGA dev board, I don't see the value proposition here. At $45, it is too expensive to use in a product. What is the killer app for this board? One can get a significantly more powerful Tang Nano 20K [1] kit on Amazon right now for $31 [2]. [1] wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/tang/tang-nano-20k/nano-20k.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-Sipeed-Development-RISC-V-Embedded/dp/B0C8N2DMJY/ https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-Sipeed-Development-RISC-V-E...
- fhfjfk 2y agoI think it's to add logic to an existing COTS device. Say you have a widget that both writes log files to an SD and reads a command script from that SD. With this FPGA card, you could implement logic that changes the command script based on the content of the logs.
- utopcell 2y agoNo you can't, there's no meaningful storage on this pcb. Besides, you could do the same with a dirt-cheap rp2040 or similar cpu. What's the FPGA added value?
- Lerc 2y agoCustom hardware has always been hard and expensive. It's really amazing that this can be done for just $45. Playing with tech like this is usually for the appeal of it in itself, which is what makes the price worth paying. That said, It would be nice to know the cost breakdown and what kind of price could ultimately be achieved if someone came up with a use that needed 10,000 of these. I kind of like the idea of a tiny game console that had something like a RP2040 inside and these were its game cartridges. Use an actual microSD for purely software games, and the FPGA for cool experimental stuff.
- utopcell 2y agoIt's really not anymore. It's trivial to make cheap PCBs and PCB assembly is even free in most cases (checkout jlcpcb.com for example).
- jamesy0ung 2y agoWhat sort of applications is a FPGA in this smaller class useful for?
- cjaackie 2y agoI was actually lucky to have gotten a FOMU from mithro years ago at a hacker event. It was really fun to play around with micropython on the RISC-V softcore [0]! Thanks to RE the entire toolchain (formerly yosys) is open source for the lattice ICE40 [1] and they continue to add more fpga bitstreams like the ECP5. If anyone is looking for a cheap (~$15) and larger fpga board to tinker with, look no further than the ColorLight 5A-75b [2] [0] https://github.com/im-tomu/fomu-workshop/blob/master/docs/riscv.rst https://github.com/im-tomu/fomu-workshop/blob/master/docs/ri... [1] https://f4pga.org/ https://f4pga.org/ [2] https://hackaday.com/2020/01/24/new-part-day-led-driver-is-fpga-dev-board-in-disguise/ https://hackaday.com/2020/01/24/new-part-day-led-driver-is-f...
- 5- 2y agojust to clarify, you can still buy fomu: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu