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Want a FPGA Board For Your Raspberry Pi Or Beagle Bone?
New submitter hamster_nz writes "Hot topics for the maker community are things such as embedded vision, Bitcoin mining, autonomous vehicle control, Arduino, Open Hardware, software defined radio, small ARM/Linux boards and reconfigurable computing. A current Kickstarter project, LOGi FPGA, is touching all these bases. Funding has been reached after just a day, and Kicktraq currently has it projected to reach over $133,000. As a long time FPGA enthusiast I'm very interested to see what will happen when a thousand keen users get together to explore programmable logic."
If it can handle the "Improv" (as featured in Slashdot @ http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/11/25/2313224/dual-core-allwinner-a20-powered-eoma-68-engineering-card-available ) it will be wonderful !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If you need an FPGA then check out the Spartan-6 LX9 MicroBoard. It is sold today for $89. You can synthesize MicroBlaze there, and you will have enough fabric left over to implement quite a few hardware blocks. It may be cheaper than stacking R-Pi or BBB and the add-on board. The kit comes with everything that you need to code for this thing (Xilinx ISE and EDK.)
I would have considered it with an LX45 or better LX75. I'll probably go with a ZTEX http://www.ztex.de/ 1.15b then instead. Is there anything comparable out there that I have missed so far?
No.
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
No, seriously ? Does anybody actually mine bitcoins with a Spartan6 with just 9K cells ? and not just as a proof of concept ?
If you already have a ARM processor, the FPGA will likely be used for real-time interfacing with the outside world - for example, many robotic applications. If this is the situation you are in then it might be worth looking at the Lattice iCE40 line of FPGA. They're small, cheap, use almost no power, and are programmed via SPI. The high-end versions have around 7500 LUTs so they are reasonably powerful.
There are some very inexpensive iCE40 developer boards on the Lattice website - between $25 and $40 (I believe). Makes for an inexpensive introduction to programmable logic. Just do not expect them to be as large and powerful as other FPGAs on the market. They were designed to compliment a CPU by interfacing and filtering sensor data thereby allowing the CPU to remain asleep for as long as possible. Most other FPGAs were designed to implement CPUs...
Meh, that Spartan 6 isn't supported in the much-better Vivado tools.
I can't think of a better price-perf ratio than the ZedBoard for this kind of designs.
Of course, if price isn't an issue, a Xilinx VC7222 (8x 28G transceivers plus a few dozen 13G ones) is better bragging rights than a quad-SLI setup...
That part will interface to external RAM, but they don't include any or connectors for it, so all you get is 576K. The Litecoin miners will be disappointed.
The Raspberry Pi has a connector layout problem, with connectors on three edges. Then these guys stack another board on top, with connectors on three different edges. They have header connectors hanging over the edge on one side, preventing a panel connection to the USB port. Then, I think, you can stack Arduno shields on top. The result is the electronics equivalent of the sillier Swiss army knife models with 50 tools.
They might have been better off making a single board with the FPGA and an ARM SOIC, along with some RAM, rather than stacking boards. It could still be Raspberry Pi software compatible, but mechanically simpler than a board stack. Like this.
But according to that "question mark in the headline"-theory, the answer is no, and apparently I don't want one :(
Assuming the $69 reward level is the price they intend shipping them at, I'd much rather spend the extra $10 to get a DE0-nano: twice the number of logic elements in the FPGA, and much more importantly *more LEDs*! :)
Can I get one for my BeagleBone Black instead?
They've invented (or rather promised to invent) a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You can already grab any number of FPGA dev boards today and interface them with your RPi or BBB for less than $100. Making another one from scratch isn't going to 1) Teach coders to be logic designers 2) Make it easier to learn the FPGA toolchain 3) Enable anybody to do something they couldn't just as easily and affordably do before. Yay crowd-funding.
[no body]
Short version: I write FPGA code for a living: don't buy this kit. Get a Xilinx MicroZed, Zed, or Altera SoCKIT. It is a revolutionary improvement over what is offered in this kickstarter at a similar price point.
Long version: If you're interested in HDL and coming from the processor world (ARM), consider the Xilinx Zed, MicroZed, or Altera SoCKIT. The Zed is $400 (slightly less with an academic discount), the MicroZed $200, and I believe you can get an Altera SoCKIT board for $100 if you attend the training (if not, it's expensive at $1600). For a hobbyist, I would probably choose the MicroZed since it's the cheapest to buy straight-out at $200, or Zed if you wanted some of the PMod peripherals.
Any of the above boards offer significant advantages over the LOGi FPGA. The Spartan 6 LX9 is disappointing as a choice, as it's a very small, last-generation device. The current SoC offerings from both Altera and Xilinx pair a processor subsystem (PS) (dual Cortex A9) with a programmable logic (PL) subsystem via an array of standard ARM interfaces (AXI). I believe all of the Xilinx/Altera offerings have between 2,000 and 3,000 built-in connections between the PS and PL. This is a tremendous advantage and offers ridiculous amounts of bandwidth between the PS and PL. It allows unprecedented cooperation between the PL and PS that leads to significantly better performance than is possible with a discrete processor and FPGA combination.
If you want a smaller form factor than the ZED board, there is MicroZED.
Be advised that working with Xilinx tools, be it ISE/Planahead or Vivado, redefines frustration to a whole new level. While the actual Zynq hardware is decent, the development tools are a bl*ed s*g p*e of s*t full of bugs and undocumented 'gotchas' that chews for hours before throwing up a diarrhea of incomprehensible error messages and/or generate an unworkable result.
Xilinx support is laughable, you will at best find very cryptic hinglish that may or may not be related to your problem but certainly does not do the needful.
Make sure to charge by the hour when contracting, or when you're in the other seat, take out a big liability insurance against workers going postal or suing you for mental abuse.
Hi all,
i'am one of the co-founder of the project and i just want to address some of your questions/remarks:
Why buying a LOGI-board when you can get a zedboard/sockit ?
The zeboard/sockit are much more powerful than what the LOGI boards can propose and they will run much higher performance applications ... but they lack support from the software community, and are definitely a no go for a beginner. The Beaglebone and Raspberry-pi benefits of a great support from the software community and kernel development community, with our board we try to bridge a gap between the hardware and software community using the beaglebone/raspberry-pi + LOGI as a collaborative platform for the two. Give a kid a zedboard and raspberry-pi and guess which one he will throw to the bin in the end. The idea of stacking boards is to follow the progress of the user and had complexity when its time to.
Why getting a LOGI-board when you can get a DE0/MicroBoard for the same price ?
The computng power of the raspberry/beaglebone processor is far better than what you can get with a NIOS/Blaze and the linux support is great. Moreover you can program the logic from the processor (i did not say design the logic) while a Blaze can't. With the Linux of these boards, you also have access to a ton of software repositories. The LOGI-boards are designed with co-design in mind, when you use Blaze/NIOS you targets both ends of the co-design problem at the same time. With the LOGI-boards you can separate the concerns.
The price problem is also difficult, DE0 and MicroBoards are subsidized by the chip vendors (Altera/Xilinx) so they can be sold for cheap. We are not subsidized so the price you pay is closer to the price you would pay to build your own product.
Thanks for all your comments, and don't hesitate to ask for more information.
Jonathan Piat
given xilinx's history in the past, whats the toolchain situation?
in the past i've had to deal with license servers, multi-thousand dollar licenses, being locked into windows,
having to reverse engineer internal formats because the tools wouldn't work for me, having day-long
synthesis/test cycles because their routing was so abysmal, etc
admittedly I'm an old fuck, so thing may have changed
i scanned the page, but they dont seem to say a single thing about tools.
what the situation?
Another choice - Zynq + transputter @ $100
http://www.parallella.org/
4wdloop
I would just like to quickly address a couple of these points that have come up in the previous posts: I would first acknowledge and concede that the current LOGi-Board offerings are not the latest, fastest, sexiest, FPGA boards on the market. There are a great deal of offerings and all having their respective strong points. The LOGi-Boards do not attest to competing with the latest SOC offerings with quad-core ARM A9 processors on-chip. The LOGi-Boards reveal themselves to the world in a humble Sparatan 6 TQFP manner. But, because LOGi is not fastest sprinter on the field, we believe that they have their place, right at the easy to use entry point to using FPGA with ARM. The current LOGi-Board offerings are our entry level with what we found to be the most cost effective per performance entry into the market. With the success of the current offering we hope to begin addressing the Camaro, high horse power offerings in the future! The point of the LOGi boards is to eliminate the time consuming, error prone procedure of creating a discrete, “perf” board, or other unreliable interface to the ARM platform. How long will this process take, what are the chances of getting the connections wrong, how well will it hold together if you decide you want to use in a project for long term usage. Do you have drivers to and API to quickly interface between the FPGA and CPU? If not do you have the skills to write your own interface drivers or API? How long will this take and how many hairs will you lose in trying to make things work? Based on on a previous post of a presumed experience HDL/Embedded user on this thread this is what you might expect “I've spent the better part of the past 3 weeks just figuring everything out on my own.” (See Re:ZedBoard, SoCKIT thread). 1) “Teach coders to be logic designers”. We make no such assertion of making coders logic designers, rather wish make FPGA’s reasonably accessible and workable from a coders perspective. I believe there is a vast contrast between being a “coder” and “logic designer” and we simply want to allow the coder to understand and be able to work with the grass on the other side of the fence. For those do not wish to learn HDL or deal with any “logic design”, we make a usable product for them as well with the LOGi-Apps. Simply download the latest pre-configured application and have it running with any of the above mentioned issues. 2) “Make it easier to learn the FPGA toolchain”. I am not sure where we made the claim of making it easier, but we do eliminate the need to use the toolchain completely if the user wishes. See previously mentioned LOGi-Apps. We do supply all of the existing wrappers and interfaces to make HDL development with said toolchain’s a greatly expedited procedure though. 3) “Enable anybody to do something they couldn't just as easily and affordably do before”. Our current offering may not be perfect, but have hope and goals of making things a little easier for those who may not have been very welcomed to the wide world of FPGA previously. If we are not there yet, well, I would say we are just getting started and will be there shortly! Happy FPGA/CPU to all!
Things did not change much (to the better, at least) - http://blog.elphel.com/2013/10/fpga-is-for-freedom/
My pi has been sitting around, doing its business on the home network for over a year.
Any chance of getting a Sata port for my Pi would be a worthwhile investment. Add to that a FPGA chip which would allow me to "play" with mining bit/lite coins, is good enough for me.
Great idea for Pi owners who are new to FPGA (eg: me), and, want to try it out on a platform which they are comfortable with.
If you want to learn FPGA why not look at the Xula by Xess?
Open-source design
XC3S200A 200,000 gate FPGA
8 MByte SDRAM
2 Mbit Flash
3.3 & 1.2V regulators
40-pin interface
PIC 18F14K50 micro
USB 2.0 port
all for $55.