On Tue, 2013-12-17 at 10:00 +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 9:06 AM, joem joem@martindale-electric.co.uk wrote:
Hi,
I ordered this FPGA dev system:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1575992013/logi-fpga-development-board-f...
[Already over subscribed by x5 and still 24 days to go :) ]
I found it has a $2 LPC1343 ARM cortex chip
http://www.microbuilder.eu/Projects/LPC1343ReferenceDesign/
sold by adafruit. good find, joe. will look at the datasheet, see what else it can do.
The FPGA logi boards are not too bad an idea for EOMAs as well. It can add an FPGA board option more cheaply than other solutions.
The FPGA programmer is an LPC1343 built into their board which manages the communication between the raspberry pi and the FPGA. From their links, circuit diagrams and a lot of software is available that allows drag and drop programming of the binary files generated by the free Linux capable (6GB) Xilinx VHDL compiler from the raspberry to the FPGA.
But so far, not been able to locate what software goes into the LPC1343 or whether that software is open sourced.
If it is open sourced, then you would be able to modify it to work with EOMA. Then you can drag and drop FPGA files from EOMA into the FPGA.
The benefit is that you should be able to make a lot hardware projects work very quickly. E.g. make a 50MHz storage scope - no problem! The EOMA drives LCD and there is several distros already working, so its very quick to knock up something that does the hardware functions in FPGA, and the displaying in EOMA.
The FPGA they use is not the fastest in the world - but it works. It is capable of compiling and running a microBlaze CPU which can run Linux. You could also add stuff from opencores.org like low speed ethernet, usb, video controller etc and get it all working very quickly to make your own custom very fast hardware gadgets that money cannot buy, or is too expensive to prototype using individual components.