Homemade hardware?
category: general [glöplog]
damn, sent too quickly; it was 8 LEDs and a serial port no parallel one
I really enjoy reading about the stuff that's being done with FPGAs. I think I could wrap my head around VHDL or Verilog but I'm shit with a soldering iron :)
if you don't want to solder, just buy some prebuilt development board. That will have more connectors than you need, but it should work as well.
An example from Xilinx ($149, one of the cheaper ones):
Of course they have more different boards, and other FPGA manufacturers have some too. I cannot really give any recommendation, since I only worked once with a Xilinx board at university (that exact board does not seem to be available any longer though).
An example from Xilinx ($149, one of the cheaper ones):
Of course they have more different boards, and other FPGA manufacturers have some too. I cannot really give any recommendation, since I only worked once with a Xilinx board at university (that exact board does not seem to be available any longer though).
that looks adorable ^^
Quote:
50 MHz crystal clock oscillator
Memory:
128 Mbit Parallel Flash
16 Mbit SPI Flash
64 MByte DDR SDRAM
Connectors and Interfaces:
Ethernet 10/100 Phy
JTAG USB download
Two 9-pin RS-232 serial port
PS/2- style mouse/keyboard port, rotary encoder with push button
Four slide switches
Eight individual LED outputs
Four momentary-contact push buttons
100-Pin expansion connection ports
Three 6-pin expansion connectors
Not bad! FPGAs are really getting cheaper and better.
Yes FPGA is getting really really usefull. Well the usefull/price ratio is getting pretty sweet. But still...its not really that coool.
Does soldering, hacking, hammering, bending and grinding your PC case (also known as modding) count? ;)
I remember gwem presenting his home made soundchip card at Outline 2k6. Sadly I can't find any reference on it on pouet :( Pity, as it had a lovely kick drum <3
I would say modding can count. But its dificult to say. AS long as you "make" it yourself and dont just by tons of ready made crap and screw it in.
mihi: Yeah, I know the Xilinx stuff, which seems excellent. It just seems that to do anything genuinely useful you need to build some custom hardware based around the FPGA, so to speak.
Very nice, though!
Very nice, though!
I have Xport 2.0 for Gameboy Advance, it's somewhat limited with its 150K gates, but on the plus side you can code most of the boring stuff for ARM and then use the GBA bus to control FPGA. Somehow, all my more advanced codings didn't really work that well/fast since I'm not very good with the SDRAM controller :)
Quote:
It just seems that to do anything genuinely useful you need to build some custom hardware based around the FPGA, so to speak.
Hmm. Demos are not really "genuinely useful", are they? :-)
Well to do anything usefull with a off the shelf CPU you really have to build a lot of coustom hardware too.
jmagic: I'd really love to have one of those!
