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So, if the "wakeup" command woke up a plasma arc microphone and only those further commands confirmed by both microphones are accepted, would that prevent this attack?

essentially an arduino with a 32 bit processor. They have even taken great care to make sure that the programming environment is identical and many of the Arduino shields work with minor code or hardware modifications. https://www.digilentinc.com/Pr...

Its 99$ for students, 2 channel 14 bit, 100 mhz sample speed, front end is less than this, 100 mhz 2 channel waveform generator and 16 channel digital stuff.

Analog discovery seems to have 5Mhz bandwidth, not 100MHz. I'm not sure why it has 100Msample/s, seems somewhat excessive for 2 channels at 5MHz.

For reference, my Rigol DS4024 has 4Gsamples/s and 200Mhz analog bandwidth with 4 channels. The samples/s figure is usually a shared resource, so the more channels you use, the less maximum samples/s you get per channel. (Might be different with more expensive models)

AnalogDiscovery.pdf

* 500uV to 5V/division; 1M, 24pF inputs with 5MHz analog bandwidth

Digilent's Analog Discovery is a good option if you can get the $99 student pricing.

2 Channels scope, 100 Msps, 2 channel function generator, 16 digital logic channels, 2 external triggers.

Software comes with a sdk.

I have been using the Analog Discovery for an embedded systems class I recently completed. The regular price is $239 but the student edition is only $99. It’s small enough to fit in your pocket, but powerful enough to replace a stack of lab equipment. It is driven by the free WaveForms software and lets you build and test analog and digital circuits in virtually any environment, in or out of the lab. Here is the link:

http://www.digilentinc.com/Pro...

2-Channel Oscilloscope
2-Channel Waveform Generator
16-Channel Logic Analyzer
16-Channel Digital Pattern Generator
±5VDC Power Supplies
Spectrum Analyzer
Network Analyzer
Voltmeter
Digital I/O
Now supported by MATLAB / MATLAB student edition.

Take a look at http://www.digilentinc.com/Pro... $99 Student pricing

http://zedboard.org/product/zedboard
https://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=ZEDBOARD
http://www.arrownac.com/solutions/sockit/
http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&No=816

It can't be the IDE.

If it was, then other more powerful Arduino-like products such as Digilent's ChipKit would have taken the market by storm... Arduino IDE, Arduino form-factor, 80 Mhz 32-bit MIPS CPU, 512K Flash. 32K SRAM, 42 I/Os, works just like a really fast 3.3V Arduino for $35. I've got one, and they are all that they say they are, but somehow they just are not Arduino,

I suspect the "Due" will somehow be "just not Ardunio" too.

Maybe there is a herding mentality where the first thing people ask themselves when deciding on a controller to use in a project is "can I do it with an Arduino?", but maybe it is just that everybody has them in their box of toys...

Yeah. call me when you have one of those this small...

These are almost exactly the same dimensions, and can support two 12 pin PMods, or five 6 pin PMods. You could hook up the OLED display PMod to one of these things without any wiring necessary at all, plug and play. Instant 128 X 32 pixel display. Try doing that with an Arduino and let me know how that turns out for you.

-=Geoskd

All I can say is that Arduino was ok for its time, but there are plenty of other better alternatives out there. Take the Digilent line of uController boards For example. the MX3CK is basically the Arduino Due with a whole ton better IO. If you want really advanced, jump to the MX7CK and kick the crap out of that Arduino. For additional fun take a look at their Pmods. Point being, there are plenty of better alternatives to the Arduino out there already; alternatives that compete and defeat on features and cost.

-=Geoskd

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596510510.do
http://www.digilentinc.com/index.cfm
http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs
http://www.parallax.com/

First off HDL vs. C or other HHL's is an apples to oranges comparison. There are ways to program an FPGA using C, but I believe it involves using soft CPU cores as a library of sort. You don't compile the C directly into an FPGA, but rather wrap a soft CPU core around it and then generate the HDL code. That or you just upload a soft cpu core and program that. I may be wrong but that is how it works from my understanding.

Second, most users are not going to write an entire configurable computing HDL design from the ground up. Most likely you are going to have an FPGA on the CPU, motherboard or expansion card along with drivers and API's that are invisible to the user. There are already PowerPC cores on FPGA chips and Xilinx just launched Zynq, an FPGA with a dual core ARM and tons of I/O. Intel is also going to offer an Atom CPU with an FPGA in the same package.

FPGA's can contain multiple "cores" that can be anything as long as they fit within the logic cell count of the FPGA. The architecture I envision is an endpoint block that interfaces the FPGA to the computer (PCI, Hyper transport, QPI, etc.) And a driver that talks to the device allowing for a common API, or at the very least raw communication. Then a configuration application allows you to download cores and then program the FPGA with the cores. Its all transparent to the user. Applications could take advantage of the FPGA directly by using a configuration API that automatically loads its own core(s) for data processing. So a video editing suite can load video codecs for en/transcoding, math programs could compile user algorithms directly into an array of parallel cores for fast processing (MatLAB already does this), audio programs can apply real-time effects through DSP cores in addition to encoding.

FPGA's are logic chips that can do anything. They can Interface to just about any bus/device and tie them together. There are already plenty of PCIe cards with FPGA's, memory, I/O and even high speed multicore DSP's. People have added compact flash cards to Apple II's, hacked the original Xbox by using an fpga as a bus sniffer. Students have implemented the NES entirely in an FPGA, there is also an FPGA arcade emulator that emulates the actual arcade hardware instead of using software emulation.
There are plenty of companies that offer INSANE FPGA platforms to build super computers, DSP farms and even emulation of complex hardware designs using FPGA farms. This tech is only going to get better and better.

FPGA Porn:
http://www.picocomputing.com/
http://www.hitechglobal.com/
http://nanobiowave.com/ATCA_FPGA_FARMS.aspx
http://www.edaptability.com/home.htm
http://enterpoint.co.uk/

I have a few FPGA boards myself. A small Cyclone board from Knjn and a 1.2M gate Spartan 3E board from Digilent. Knjn also has what I believe is the cheapest PCI(e) cards, there is one based on a cheaper Lattice chip that is 99 bucks but Its tied to a crippling and expensive annual license. These vendors have great starter kits:
http://www.digilentinc.com/ (sweet student discounts and great tools that are available for Linux. Their boards are targeted at education and research, lots of I/O interfaces and add on's called "pmods")
http://www.knjn.com/ (Cheap easy to program boards but I think their documentation is lacking. They are however, very helpful when you email them. I believe its a relatively small mom and pop company)

The Papilio is the Arduino of FPGA boards:
http://papilio.cc/index.php?n=Papilio.Papilio

Happy hardware hacking.

You're thinking Arduino. If performance is a concern you can try the Arduino-compatible ChipKIT 32 from Digilent, which is an Arduino-compatible device using a more powerful PIC microcontroller.

Its not a PIC24F but there is one (at least) http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,719,895&Prod=CHIPKIT-MAX32 after I find something fairly permanent for my arduino pro mini to do, I might get one.

It would also be nice with a similar system based around an FPGA.

I know that there are some people working on these sorts of ideas, so hopefully something will take off.

Uh, perhaps this board from Digilent? Or this kit from Xilinx? Or similar offerings from Altera and Actel?

What am I missing?

Mostly correct, but flash isn't THAT slow. My nice little Digilent FPGA board has 70ns flash on it - I can read read a location in under a 10th of a microsecond.

The latency on SSDs isn't due to the flash itself, but due mostly to the time taken for the data to be squirted up the SATA interface. That is why flash on PCIe cards making an appearance in high-end systems.

Due to the Von Neuman bottleneck, most of the transistors in a computer are in the RAM, which is idle except for the row/column being accessed at a given time. The bitgrid gets around this by building a grid of look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits. It should be quite easy to build a chip which has a million of these tables in a 1000x1000 grid. This would allow data to flow off the edges at a result per clock cycle.... which in modern CMOS is at least 1 Ghz.

No offense, but poster is an idiot - what he is describing is called a FPGA, readily available, and image processing (for scientific, industrial purposes etc) is one of its many applications. A few hundred $$ will buy you a board with FPGA on it that has hundreds of thousands, or even millions "look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits" (look up table = LUT, which effectively translates into a simple logic gate of your choice).

No, creating 1000x1000 grids of those isn't easy, but Xilinx, Altera etc. have been doing it for a while now. And building a FPGA isn't the hard part anymore - understanding the architecture, thinking up effective ways to use them, and programming them, is.

Here's the platform that enthusiasts can use to tinker with OpenSPARC.

Opal Kelly modules are clean, well-documented designs, but because of their relatively high cost they're better thought of as embeddable modules rather than as learning platforms. For education and basic home tinkering, you want a cheap well-documented board with lots of peripherals to play with.

I think the best overall learning platform right now is the Nexys2. You can teach yourself everything from USB interfacing to VHDL/Verilog design for $129, and it's got a lot of switches, lights, ports, and outboard RAM to play with.

There are also a couple of reasonably priced books written especially for novices learning logic design with the Digilent platforms. $200 will get you both the basic- and advanced-level books from LBE and a Nexys2 to do the exercises. Very hard to beat that combination IMHO. (You can use the Nexys2 with the first book, even though it was written for the lower-end Basys board.)

It will enable you to write real code for an FPGA using a subset of normal F# with some parallel programming semantics. You can download it here. That is, you can write normal F# code and calculate some result as a regular F# program on your pc, then compile the code for the FPGA and see the same output on an FPGA. It's ideal for a software programmer like yourself who wants to get started with serious FPGA programming. There are many good books on verilog and VHDL. For VHDL one of the best is Peter Ashenden's "The Designer's Guide to VHDL". For verilog a good book is Vranesic and Brown's "Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Verilog Design" (they also have a similar book for VHDL).

Xess has a good Xilinx-based started board and great tutorials. As other's have mentioned, Digilent also has some good starter boards. The company was started by a couple of professors from Washington State University. A course that one of them teaches (Clint Cole) has some excellent tutorials on FPGAs. Make sure you get a board with a VGA interface and check out some of the classic arcade game projects implemented on an FPGA (eg, fpgaarcade.com). Enjoy!

Get a board from http://www.digilentinc.com/ and use Xilinx WebPack software (Free as in beer) They have a lot of onboard hardware such as RAM (usually SRAM), buttons/switches/LCDs, etc. They cost about $60 USD to $2k

Digilent makes some more nice boards, including what a number of universities use.

I've found (if I remember correctly) that comparable boards are actually cheaper (especially with academic licensing!).
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,400&Cat=10

or a particular board:
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,519&Prod=S3BOARD

Digilent makes some more nice boards, including what a number of universities use.

I've found (if I remember correctly) that comparable boards are actually cheaper (especially with academic licensing!).
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,400&Cat=10

or a particular board:
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,519&Prod=S3BOARD

I would recommend a board made by Digilent as they seem to have the greatest selection of add-ons and features plus their boards are high quality from my experience. As for the FPGA, I always recommend Xilinx because of the availability of free development tools, Linux support ( I currently have their WebPACK ISE running under Kubuntu 9.04 ) and the general superiority of their products, especially for projects that involve high speeds, a large number of gates and/or flip-flops eg. a microprocessor and even low power -- Xilinx' weakness has always been their relatively high standby/leakage current compared to other vendors, but they've significantly improved upon that with the Spartan-3A and the just released Spartan 6 chips.

As a Spartan 6 dev board is going to be expensive ( Xilinx' Spartan-6 FPGA SP601 Evaluation Kit is $295 and AFAIK it's the only entry level board currently available for that chip ) right now, I would recommend a Spartan 3A board. Specifically I would recommend Xilinx' Spartan-3A Starter Kit as it has the right amount of features for the price ( $189 ) and it's made by Digilent although if you're on a *really* tight budget you can get kits based off of this chip for as low as $49

jdb2

In most of our EE classes, we purchased some educational boards from Digilent.

http://www.digilentinc.com/

I have no frame of reference, but I enjoyed working with them.

Go here: http://www.digilentinc.com

Buy the Nexy2 board for about $70. It has: 8-bit vga, 1 serial p., 8-seg disp., some flash mem., and a bunch of switches and leds. Uses Spartan3e chip, and comes with a nice case and USB programming cable. Programming software (adept) only works in Win., but you can get a linux programmer if needed. The Xilinx ISE or EDK stuff works in either windows or linux. Bonus: gvim works as an editor in ISE :)

It basically comes with everything you need and should keep you occupied for several months; it's what we use at my university to introduce students to FPGAs in the lab. Feel free to contact me for more info.

Digilent FPGA boards

http://digilentinc.com/

For those interested in the 'programming' of hardware processors
via software tools like Verilog / VHDL, the following will be of interest.
Just as with "Open Source" software there is "Open Source Hardware" too including Verilog/VHDL source codes for CPUs and other chips like ethernet controllers or MPEG decoders or so on that can be freely downloaded and compiled into FPGAs or used to create dedicated silicon chips.

Unfortunately even though anyone can freely WRITE or ADAPT Open Source [or not] VHDL / Verilog code to implement great new CPUs or other devices, the ability to get that turned into an actual CHIP cost effectively for hobby / low volume users basically doesn't exist. Usually you're looking at $100,000 or so of costs to start producing any significant piece of semicustom silicon and then you're looking at ordering at least thousands, or millions of identical parts before the amortization of the production costs starts to make the proposition attractive. FPGAs can be used to implement simple programmable hardware designs, but it'd be a pretty unique application of them that'd achieve any cost/performance benefit over doing things in an alternative way unless you're really just doing "few of a kind" prototyping.

There's little opportunity for small scale electronics hobbyists or FPGA tinkering anymore. The lower cost ($10-$300) FPGA chips and especially development boards ($60-$1000) are so basic that you really can't do much interesting / useful with them that you couldn't do as well or better if you just bought a $300 PC and implemented your computation and project around its capabilities.

That said, FYI, here are a couple of the lower cost FPGA development boards I've seen:
http://www.digilentinc.com/

You COULD program a modest sized (250k-2M gate equivalent) FPGA to implement some kind of legacy CPU [PDP, VAX, 8080, Z80, SPARC] or small cluster of those cores, sometimes even with better performance than the ORIGINAL silicon CPU ever achieved in its time. But just don't expect it to computationally compete [in 99.99% of common tasks] with a $80 INTEL ATOM CPU/motherboard (which provides about 2 GigaFlops of CPU power) -- it's just NOT going to happen.

The higher end FPGA chips ($100-$1,000) and development boards with the better capability FPGAs attached ($1000-$10,000) are so expensive and often so difficult to use that they're just impractical to consider for virtually any use that one can practically find an alternative to.
The 'compute power' of even a large / advanced 1 Million to 20 Million gate FPGA -- even one which INCLUDES dedicated function CPUs in its silicon -- is still often inferior to a $300 PC with a dual core CPU. For certain kinds of very parallel or very specialized DSP algorithms the FPGA will perhaps be 10x - 100x faster than you could implement with a PC programmed for the same DSP/CODEC function, but those are a rarity, and if they're important / popular functions usually you'll be able to buy a cheap PC peripheral [e.g. GPU, encryption coprocessor, RAID controller, MPEG encoder/decoder chip] to perform that task much more cost effectively than you could possibly do it with an FPGA.

For any kind of task that is computational in essence, using a commodity PC or a dedicated [non FPGA] piece of silicon to implement it is 99% of the time the right choice.

If you have some kind of special [i.e. you can't do it with a PC and less than $200 of added interface peripherals] electrical INTERFACE problem then a FPGA can be a very handy solution since the one useful thing they do have is a lot of (dozens to hundreds) of electrical I/O pins you can program for various purposes.

Tragically though they're rather behind the times and they generally don't make it cost effectively possible to implement modern RELEVANT electrical interfaces in FPGAs -- no gigabit ethernet, no USB 2.0 high speed, no firewire, no SATA, no PCI express, no DDR2/DDR3 RAM, no bluetooth, no 802.11 WLAN, no PCI, so bas

Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs http://www.xilinx.com/) are increasingly being used in the classrooms for teaching digital electronics. You can get a good starter board with 500K gates for around 150 bucks and the design software is free from the FPGA vendors.

Heres a couple of links to FPGA based development boards:

• Digilent http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Nav1=Products&Nav2=Programmable&Prod=S3EBOARD/
• Xilinx http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-SPAR3E-SK-US-G.htm

Here's one that's practically a steal: http://www.digilentinc.com/s3e/

For $150 you get an XC3S500, 16MB Flash, 64MB DDR SDRAM, Ethernet, a character LCD display, built-in programmer, ADCs and DACs, a whole bunch of smaller Flash/EEPROM memories, serial ports, one-bit-per-color VGA port, and a PS/2 mouse/keyboard port. I've been using it as a logic anazyer lately, and I'm going to try to write a NAND Flash emulator for it (interfaced via Ethernet to a PC). Great for beginner projects, and it can also implement quite a bit of older hardware :)

Use a $150 Spartan 3E Starter Board from http://digilentinc.com/

It has 4 channels of 12 bit DAC and 2 channels 13 bit ADC.

If you want 24 bit I/O you can just by the cheapest board avaiable and solder on CODEC (AC97 is 18 bit, Analog Devices makes 24 bit ones)

you might be getting ripped off if you're paying $1500 for a Spartan-3 board.

I guess they don't really have the board volume to get low prices. But If you want a graphics card for $1500 that's probably less functional than an NVidia commodity card, I'm not gonna stop you.

OTOH, If you're interested in FPGA programming and a novice at it, you'll want to get a MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper Spartan board (like 50 to 150). See http://digilentinc.com/ for good starter boards.
If you're serious about FPGA programming (or just willing to pay $1500 to $3000) you will definitely want to get a board with a Virtex or Stratix on board:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML501-UNI-G.htm

If you want to have it on PCIx:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML555-G.htm

You can also get FPGAs socketted for AMD's Hypertransport bus and Intel's FSB:
http://xtremedatainc.com/ (Altera FPGAs)
http://drccomputer.com/ (Xilinx FPGAs)
http://nallatech.com/
http://celoxica.com/

(some of these vendors also sell PCI solutions)

FPGA programming environments still mostly suck. it's a market impeded by proprietary standards and a whole lot of NP-Hard algorithms. We're working on it...

The ATX-style powersupply is a pain to add in.

I want an inexpensive board like this that takes a 12V supply, or
a PC hd connector like the FPGA boards out there from http://www.digilentinc.com/

It would be easier to put these in autos or stack them up for
robotics projects that way.

- Ralph

Once you decide you want a robot, you'll need a board with a processor. These are systems that have good documentation, and some even claim some degree of "openness" in publishing schematics and encouraging you to build your boards yourself.

• MIT's Gogoboard (PIC microcontroller based 30-40 to build plus PC board) http://padthai.media.mit.edu:8080/cocoon/gogosite/ home.xsp?lang=en
• CMU's $400 TerkBot (FPGA and ARM) http://www.terk.ri.cmu.edu/recipes/index.php
• (I'm sure Stanford has something here too - I just don't know what it is)
• ARM7 boards with Ethernet for around $100 - Aleph1 claims some openness, but their site is down
• FPGA 'education' boards for $100-$150 w/ VGA and PC features http://www.digilentinc.com/

I'll plug the guys I know: http://digilentinc.com/

I've worked with a handful of their boards and they are pretty nice. These guys exist to serve the academic market and even take a hit on some of the boards they sell at academic pricing. If you work with them, tell them the WSU LUG sent you.

Well many PCs come with serial and parallel ports for reasons other than just home users. Embedded systems developers use those extensively. I have a USB to serial device for my laptop because it doesn't have any serial ports. I cannot use my JTAG 3 Cable Instead I must use the USB cable which requires special software and isn't integrated with my development tools.

Yes you're right in the fact that adoption is a big issue. Part of the reason adoption is slow is because of lack of backwards compatibility. If my keyboard and mouse still work, why buy a new one? PCI-Express is a prime example, last I checked all I could find that use it was video cards. If that still is the case, why have a computer with nothing but PCI-Express in it. I dont know what MoBos you're looking at, the only ones without PCI-X that I have seen are server boards. Even then alot that I've looked at *I'm starting to price out a new desktop* have it.

ATX on the other hand was quickly adopted, this is because it is behind the scenes. If you build a new computer without gutting your old one, you need a new power supply etc to go with it. It all depends on the impact of the change on the user. Users are willing to pickup a Mobo w/ PCI-X when they build a new system. A killer for a while was no AGP cards for those without PCI-X. Finally they filled that gap recently. No one wants to build a new computer every 6 months. The resistance to change echos from that. Companies do not want to alienate previous customers.

For PCBs, be sure to check out Barebones. I've done a couple of runs through them, including one involving a chip-scale BGA package, and they did a great job. They're really a front for one of the previously-mentioned PCB operations, Advanced Circuits. For FPGA and CPLD prototyping, definitely go to Digilent. I've bought a few products from them and have been consistently impressed. Finally, it's probably an obvious choice, but eBay is always a good resource too. Many deals can be had in the "Electronic Components" category of their "Business & Industrial" section.

You can use the MicroBlaze "soft" processor with the $100 Digilent board. http://www.digilentinc.com/assets/documents/d2e_rm .pdf You can put the processor, bus, UART, general purpose IO block to blink LEDs, 7-segment, switches, buttons, also connect to the LCD display or even a VGA port... Note: A "soft" processor is a processor that is implemented using an FPGA's configurable logic.

Only if you buy the wrong ones....

A nice list of FPGA dev boards and their prices

A nice cheap (and well loaded) dev board ($149)

I've got one of these, they are real nice for $99

These guys have lots of good stuff too. Inexpensive, and nice. I own a bunch of stuff I bought from them.