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- Luke just got back from Maker Faire Bay Area
- 0h 0m 48s
- Arduino FPGA board
- 0h 1m 4s
- Want lots of serial ports
- 0h 2m 59s
- Porting sketches from one micro to another
- 0h 6m 30s
- FPGAwars
- 0h 9m 41s
- Remake of Pong
- 0h 10m 35s
- Need tools for things to be simpler
- 0h 11m 22s
- Tim Mithro Ansell
- 0h 11m 43s
- Clifford Wolf who started project ICEstorm
- 0h 11m 51s
- FPGAwars hashtag
- 0h 13m 0s
- APio for building FPGAs
- 0h 13m 13s
- Obijuan Academy
- 0h 13m 54s
- Learning Verilog
- 0h 14m 44s
- Data pipeline vs State machines and control
- 0h 16m 24s
- Similar to an “if” statement on a micro
- 0h 16m 51s
- Faster to write imperative code
- 0h 17m 14s
- Serial port example
- 0h 18m 3s
- Low power FPGA collects data, wakes up the micro and then transmits
- 0h 19m 24s
- “You’re not writing code any more, you’re describing hardware”
- 0h 22m 6s
- Wants to be able to take code and then sythesis in logic
- 0h 23m 43s
- Why is FPGA needed in a world of cheap micros
- 0h 26m 58s
- Amazing $1 microcontroller
- 0h 27m 27s
- When should people switch to an FPGA
- Customized peripherals
- Being sure of the hardware that’s going into micr
- FGPAs have room for change in the future (Especially if you think the protocol will change in the future)
- 0h 29m 54s
- Chris has experienced this with a video recorder that sells digital upgrades.
- 0h 33m 1s
- Also useful in test jigs to emulate hardware
- 0h 33m 6s
- Explaining the hardware
- 0h 35m 40s
- A series is 1.2×0.7
- 0h 36m 32s
- Same size as Teensy
- 0h 36m 59s
- Doesn’t have the end pins like the Teensy
- 0h 39m 0s
- Buy the boards on Tindie
- 0h 39m 44s
- Difference between a and b series
- 0h 40m 57s
- Bugblat tif
- 0h 41m 7s
- Learned surface mount soldering
- 0h 44m 11s
- Can find purchaseable boards and more on TinyFPGA.com
- 0h 45m 54s
- Lattice Mach XO2
- CPLD replacement
- 0h 46m 31s
- No DSP blocks
- 0h 46m 39s
- Might be able to fit a micro in A2
- 0h 47m 23s
- A2 has a hard SPI block
- 0h 47m 52s
- Put store up on tindie for A1
- 0h 48m 58s
- Digilent clint cole
- 0h 49m 35s
- Having a board on the shelf could help for projects/hackathons/when in a bind
- 0h 51m 22s
- There used to be a B2
- 0h 52m 50s
- USB connector is SMT
- 0h 53m 57s
- BX board is 4 layer with BGA ICE40 81 ball 0.4 pitch
- 0h 54m 49s
- Package is meant to be used in a high density interconnect
- 0h 55m 41s
- B2 pins are mostly IO
- 0h 56m 34s
- Leaves some pins tri-stated and breaks out the deep hard IP blocks
- 0h 57m 22s
- Using PCBway with 4/4 process, via is 0.2 mm
- 0h 59m 49s
- Wanted more IO for the Bx boards
- 1h 1m 16s
- Squished pads narrower and elongated them
- 1h 1m 26s
- Everything is on github
- 1h 1m 53s
- Choose your side t-shirt
- 1h 3m 23s
- Re-using pins like the SPI flash
- 1h 5m 4s
- Once config is complete, the SPI is handed over to the user design
- 1h 6m 12s
- Recommends moving to a larger package
- 1h 7m 30s
- Decided not to do castellation
- 1h 9m 12s
- B series guide
- 1h 9m 54s
- BX has a different pin constraint file
- 1h 10m 46s
- Recommends using APio on commandline
- 1h 11m 9s
- IDE using Atom with APio plugin
- 1h 11m 18s
- Using IceCube2 toolchain
- 1h 12m 4s
- APio supports mostly pin constraints
- 1h 15m 17s
- Symbiflow is the next gen of opensource tools
- 1h 16m 0s
- FPGA_dave
- 1h 16m 56s
- ECP5 will be the next FPGA
- 1h 17m 32s
- Wants to use SERDES
- 1h 17m 47s
- Targeting crowdfunding campaign in fall
- 1h 20m 1s
- Currently have to preorder the BX, due in July
- 1h 20m 13s
- B series has an USB in the FPGA fabric
- 1h 22m 20s
- Gets enumerated as a serial port
- 1h 23m 6s
- Users can pull in the USB device to their projects
- 1h 25m 0s
- Can store metadata in the spi flash that talks to the programmer
- 1h 25m 38s
- Like a map file + UID
- 1h 26m 1s
- Dave Vandenbout XESS
- 1h 27m 35s
- Professor in Egypt doing FPGA online compiler
- 1h 29m 36s
- SDR radio people
- 1h 31m 6s
- Hackaday Supercoference
- 1h 33m 14s
- Ordered 1250 boards, 600 ordered
- 1h 36m 14s
- TinyFPGA on Twitter, GitHub, Tindie. Luke is on Hackaday as lukevalenty
- 1h 36m 30s
I think Chris’s keyboard analogy extends to the entire software/hardware abstraction ala Arduino/Pi/Linus-as-RTOS/ESPxxxx/MicroPhython/copy-paste-from-other-people’s-libraries/Github/Modular-Cell-Phone/etc movement.
People in this world (the kind of people who use an FPGA for Pong) are just tinkerers trying to control something because they though it would be cool. They’re not trying to learn about software/hardware or make a production-level product. It’s just a hobby, a curiosity that should be easy and fun. If the end result is 1000x larger or more expensive, power hungry, less safe, etc… it doesn’t really matter, so long as it does what they want.
No different than when I bolt go-fast things onto my car. I’m not taking it to a track, just kind of a hobby and maybe I’ll learn a little about cars.
Now if someone’s goal was to learn about low level programming and electronics, 95% of their time investment was wasted learning these ‘tools’.
The only use case for FPGA, to me, appears to be when cost and power consumption doesn’t matter. Kind of the opposite of a microcontroller environment.
Would love to see a real-world professional example beyond test fixtures or troubleshooting, but can’t find one.
Bunnie had a great post where he compares LiteX with Vivado (LiteX is a soft-fork of Migen/MiSoC).
So if the bugblat tif is 1″x0.7″, what’s the size of the TinyFpga boards?
Is there any tutorials/workshops that use APio/Migen for learning FPGAs?
Also checkout the Nandland channel on youtube. Excellent fpga video’s!
Got a TinyFPGA on order! Would not have known about it without the Amphour! Thank you!!!
Also found a Lattice MachX03 dev board deal on the lattice site after reviewing Lattice offerings from hearing this podcast.
Thank you Luke and Chris for a great show!
-Chris