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Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent
I've been hacking away lately, and I'm now proud to show off my newest project - The Icepi Zero!
In case you don't know what an FPGA is, this phrase summarizes it perfectly:
"FPGAs work like this. You don't tell them what to do, you tell them what to BE."
You don't program them, but you rewrite the circuits they contain!
So I've made a PCB that carries an ECP5 FPGA, and has a raspberry pi zero footprint. It also has a few improvements! Notably the 2 USB b ports are replaced with 3 USB C ports, and it has multiple LEDs.
This board can output HDMI, read from a uSD, use a SDRAM and much more. I'm very proud the product of multiple weeks of work. (Thanks for the pcb reviews on r/PrintedCircuitBoard )
(All the sources on github under an open source license :D)
PS. See some more pics on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/1kwxvk8/ive_made_my_first_fpga_board_the_icepi_zero/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/1kwxvk8/ive_made_my_f...
- aappleby 1y agoTake my money already. :D
- NoOn3 1y agoAnother project like FPGA in "Pi Zero" format was fleaFPGA_Ohm (http://fleasystems.com/fleaFPGA_Ohm.html http://fleasystems.com/fleaFPGA_Ohm.html).
- duskwuff 1y agoYep - unfortunately, that never appears to have been available for purchase outside the Indiegogo campaign.
- teamonkey 1y agoNo crowdsupply?
- Cyao 1y agoAfter the amount of emails i got asking if i sell the boards, I just applied to crowdsupply :P
- lukevp 1y agoI have no idea about this product category but am interested in learning more about FPGAs. What is the ballpark price point that something like this would be? Are we talking $100 or $1000?
- tverbeure 1y agoNot OP, but these kind of boards are ballpark between $100-$200. Here’s a similar board with the same FPGA: https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s.
- robinsonb5 1y agoAnother similar board (perhaps even more similar than the ULX3S) is the IceSugarPro - it's sub-$100 for the module and breakout board. [I enjoy reading your blog by the way - just last week I picked up a Pano Logic G1 on EBay!]
- tverbeure 1y agoThanks! I'm looking forward to your Pano Logic pull requests! :-)
- wyager 1y agoThis would probably fall in the $100 range if comparable to other ECP5 dev boards like OrangeCrab.
- Cyao 1y agoat bulk 40-50$! My dev batch of 5 comes out at around 70$ per board, but it has a large startup cost.
- kriro 1y agoDon't offer them too cheaply. Typically you want to roughly sell for 4x your buy price. 200 seems good and there should be plenty demand at that price. Great work. I'll look into this after my vacation as it seems quite interesting for our university courses.
- deivid 1y agoCan you sell these assembled? Using Tang nano for learning right now, but the tooling and docs situation is not great
- Graziano_M 1y agoThe icebreaker is great and easy to get up and running, plus it has pmod headers which makes it easy to add add-ons.
- duskwuff 1y agoYep, and I love it. That's a much smaller (and lower pin count) FPGA than this ECP5, though.
- robinsonb5 1y agoIceSugarPro (with its breakout board) is quite a nice board if you want something pre-assembled. Same FPGA as this new board (so also supported by the Open Source toolchain), same size SDRAM, HDMI out but PMODs for everything else. I really like the look of this new board, though - I definitely want to get my hands on one. (I also have a Tang Nano 20K but don't like it all that much.)
- Gracana 1y agoI have the icesugar pro as well. I like the SODIMM form factor because it works well on a cheap four-layer carrier board and it exposes a lot of IO, which is what I want when I'm doing stuff with FPGAs.
- nebula8804 1y agoWhat is this FPGA capable of? Can any of the cores of the MISter cores be ported over to this?
- Cyao 1y agoit probably can - I see that uls3x already has a few ported over cores, and they will be able to run on this fpga with little modifs
- whitehexagon 1y agoI found this one so far: https://github.com/emard/ulx3s_c64 https://github.com/emard/ulx3s_c64 Exciting to have an alternative to de10-nano, especially seeing the price doubled? since I got mine. Amazing project anyway, and brings back dreams of building some arcade cabinates. Icepi Zero looks perfect for the job! I hope they arrive in the EU one day.
- robinsonb5 1y agoI recently got a build of the Minimig Amiga core running on IceSugarPro (which has the same FPGA and same size SDRAM) - only the ECS chipset (no AGA) but I did get RTG graphics working at 1280x720x16bit. It uses PS/2 rather than USB for keyboard and mouse, but apart from that it would be trivial to port to this new board.
- jwrallie 1y agoIf I understood correctly, the ECP5 FPGA can be designed for with open source tooling [0][1], which makes this even more awesome. OP, if you are planning to commercialize these, try to confirm compatibility, that will definitely make it more attractive! [0] https://hackernoon.com/getting-started-using-open-source-fpga-tools https://hackernoon.com/getting-started-using-open-source-fpg... [1] https://github.com/YosysHQ/prjtrellis https://github.com/YosysHQ/prjtrellis
- kaoD 1y agoWhat's the approximate cost of materials?
- MegaDeKay 1y agoI checked out his post on Reddit [0]. OP (cyao12) wrote a CPU in Verilog at the age of 13 and is now only 16. Mind. Blown. cyao12: I'm going to try and put the old cpu I made in verilog when I was 13 on it! The sdram is okay, the traces are short enough that the distance difference doesn't matter :D Collez_boi: You made a freaking CPU in Verilog when you were 13?! That's crazy. cyao12: Yeaaah, but tbh the design wasnt really good lol. Im 16 now so Im quite happy about my progress [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/1kwxvk8/ive_made_my_first_fpga_board_the_icepi_zero/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/1kwxvk8/ive_made_my_f...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sockbot 1y agoWhat would it take for something like this to output eDP over one of the USB C ports? What are the design and hardware requirements?
- ComplexSystems 1y agoNeat stuff! Is this similar to the Arduino MKR Vidor?
- robinsonb5 1y agoSomewhat similar, yes - but the vidor had a smaller FPGA, a smaller RAM chip, and the board contained a small supporting microcontroller as well as the FPGA.
- ost-ing 1y agoFpga is kind of like the final frontier in my embedded trajectory, haven’t made the leap yet mainly because microcontrollers or fixed arch cpus are fast enough for most consumer tech. I’d love to give it a shot one day though
- mysterydip 1y agoImpressive! Looks well thought out. FPGA programming is something I've wanted to get into, this might be my entry point. Great work!
- jedbrooke 1y agocan the HDMI be configured as input? this looks super cool! it’s inspiring me to finally dust of the NeTV2 board I have. but alas time for hobbies has been in short supply for a while
- Cyao 1y agoit can! no reason why it wouldnt be
- peterburkimsher 1y agoLooks great! Is there an FPGA board with HDMI in and out? I’d like to build an HDMI freeze button to transmit a single frame at the push of a button. (e.g. during a meeting or church when noticing mistakes on the PPT slides).
- mschuster91 1y agoIf you want something that's made for professional use, look at the BlackMagic ATEM series. I think that should have you covered.
- peterburkimsher 1y agoThanks, but I’d prefer open-source rather than professional.
- nsteel 1y agoHave you conaidered a £10 HDMI capture card? Not open source, or much of a project, but it would Just Work.
- peterburkimsher 1y agoI've got an Elgato Camlink, but need the freeze button (e.g. CamLink input to a Raspberry Pi full-screen, feeding through to HDMI output, with a GPIO button to pause the live stream).
- utopcell 1y agoThis looks like a great project, a fun toy to play with. However, stating that: > I've always wanted a low-cost portable FPGA with video output to make my own CPU, but there isn't any on the market. is definitely not true: one can buy Sipeed's Tang Nano boards for $25+ on Amazon (or less if one needs fewer than 20k LUTs).
- Cyao 1y agoOh that's nice, how come I never saw those!
- robinsonb5 1y agoThe Gowin chips are quite interesting - they have RAM built in to the FPGA itself. It's SDRAM in the case of the Tang Nano 20k. It's a 32-bit wide RAM, but unfortunately only 8 megabytes, which is a bit limiting. The FPGA's clocking is a bit limited, too. (For that reason, there's an extra clock generator on the Tang Nano 20k.)
- utopcell 1y agoYou stepped up to share something, we shared something back. :-)
- utopcell 1y agoThe FPGA used seems to be quite popular in the hobbyist community. If you don't care about the form factor, there exist relatively cheap high-volume ECP5-based boards that have been repurposed to be general FPGA dev boards [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Price-Colorlight-5A-75B-Screen-Receiving/dp/B09R1JFKH5 https://www.amazon.com/Price-Colorlight-5A-75B-Screen-Receiv...
- robinsonb5 1y agoThe only downside of those is that the SDRAM chip is wired with its DQM pins tied low, which means you can't do byte writes to SDRAM - you have to write a full word at a time. That makes it much harder to port existing cores to the ColorLight boards.