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skrasms
Joined: Feb 21, 2008 Posts: 121 Location: Portland, OR
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Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2013 6:25 pm Post subject:
Interesting $50 Altera Cyclone V FPGA Development Board |
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I stumbled across this yesterday:
http://components.arrow.com/part/detail/NEG65669932S517051N1911
They don’t seem to be actively marketing it in the US yet, even though it’s shown as being in stock. Here’s the hardware reference from the Asian branch of the same distributor:
http://components-asiapac.arrow.com/file_system/intranet/MAR/ADRE/File/Hardware_Reference_Guide_for_BeMicro_CV_A2_v1.04.pdf
The cool features, in my opinion:
1) Built-in USB Programmer/Debugger
2) MicroSD slot
3) 1 Gbit of 16-bit DDR3, and the FPGA hardware includes a dedicated DDR3 controller!
4) 16 Mbit Configuration flash
5) Cyclone V Fabric (wider LUTs than Cyclone IV, better DSP support, more PLL flexibility)
6) 1.76 Mbit of FPGA memory blocks (for a comparison, the $80 DE0-Nano board only has 0.594 Mbit)
7) Two 40-pin I/O connectors with a jumper to choose 3.3V or 2.5V logic levels
I’m going to buy a couple and see how that goes. They’re cheap enough to dedicate to projects. I figured it was worth mentioning here since low-cost FPGA dev boards are coming up a lot lately. _________________ Software and Hardware Design |
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emeb
Joined: Dec 16, 2008 Posts: 35 Location: Arizona
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Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 10:50 pm Post subject:
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Anyone buy one of these?
I ordered one and got it last week. Tried out a couple of the demo designs and they seem to have worked. The SD card test ran fine.
Overall its not a particularly well supported board, but it has a lot of potential for someone who's a self-starter and can figure out a lot of the details for themselves. The 0.1" 2-row headers should be fairly easy to interface to, but the standardized card-edge connector no longer appears to have a lot of hardware available for interfacing (there used to be a bunch of stuff, but most of it is no longer available, or still out there and extremely expensive). The mating connector is fairly expensive in non-production quantity so it's probably not practical to use for home projects.
Anyway - a lot of potential but it will take some effort to use. |
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skrasms
Joined: Feb 21, 2008 Posts: 121 Location: Portland, OR
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Posted: Sat Nov 16, 2013 2:32 pm Post subject:
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emeb wrote: | Anyone buy one of these?
I ordered one and got it last week. Tried out a couple of the demo designs and they seem to have worked. The SD card test ran fine.
Overall its not a particularly well supported board, but it has a lot of potential for someone who's a self-starter and can figure out a lot of the details for themselves. The 0.1" 2-row headers should be fairly easy to interface to, but the standardized card-edge connector no longer appears to have a lot of hardware available for interfacing (there used to be a bunch of stuff, but most of it is no longer available, or still out there and extremely expensive). The mating connector is fairly expensive in non-production quantity so it's probably not practical to use for home projects.
Anyway - a lot of potential but it will take some effort to use. |
Did you find a demo design for this board specifically, or did you modify a demo design from another board? I ask because I haven't been able to find any example projects specific to this board (pin assignments, etc). Mine arrived this week, and I was about to make a new project from scratch. _________________ Software and Hardware Design |
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emeb
Joined: Dec 16, 2008 Posts: 35 Location: Arizona
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engineer
Joined: Mar 31, 2014 Posts: 11 Location: Frankfurt / Germay
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Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 10:13 am Post subject:
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Should be a bit too small for more than just some basic functions. I recommonde to consider the Cylcone iV D115 from terasic. It hast 115k LEs and is large enough for big apps. |
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