Brewing Up a myStorm FPGA board on the kitchen table

Brewing Up a myStorm FPGA board on the kitchen table(folknologylabs.wordpress.com)

65 points by monsonite 9 years ago | 27 comments

zombees 9 years ago |

I love all the FPGA boards coming out but I really wish the software was better. Lattice uses the same synthesizer as Xilinx which is well known to be completely user hostile (will silently optimize huge swaths of code because it doesn't like them). The least headaches come from Altera but that's not a high bar...

zerohp 9 years ago | |

This chip from Lattice is supported by icestorm. It is the only open source FPGA tool chain.

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

rvense 9 years ago | | |

And I think you'll find this is the exact reason the iCE40s are showing up in so many hobbyist projects.

I'm at my hackerspace right now. There's three people with HX8K evaluation boards at this table alone (I've got two, actually). None of us have even downloaded the Lattice tools.

I've got the HX8K eval board doing text over VGA at 1280x1024 with a simple home-etched PCB that plus into it and some very naive code, hope to hit 1920x1080... It's a lot of fun. The toolchain has some niggles, but overall it's extremely pleasant and I'm so happy it exists. I've been wanting to work with programmable logic for a few years since getting into electronics, but I've just not got along with the Xilinx and Altera tools.

ElaineB 9 years ago | |

You might consider Clifford Wolf's Project Ice Storm - an open source tool chain for several Lattice devices - consisting of YoSys Synthesiser and Arachne Place and Route.

sargun 9 years ago | |

I think with Intel starting off on FPGAs, we might see some sanity. It's clear that those FPGAs can compute with GPGPU workloads, and depending on their adoption, we might see similar tooling.

makomk 9 years ago | |

The Xilinx synthesizer is certainly interesting. I had some fun porting a design someone else had created for I think Synplify to that a few years back, because it went and replaced a state machine crossing two clock domains with one that wasn't safe for that purpose.

nikofeyn 9 years ago | |

the national instruments myRIO board has probably the lowest barrier to entry for FPGA programming and also microcontroller programming since it uses a zynq processor, both of which are programmed with LabVIEW. it also runs a real-time linux OS. but it isn't available to the general public, being reserved for academic use. i am not for sure why.

joshu 9 years ago |

This would be better if there was a link to the actual product.

papower 9 years ago | |

They have an intro to the myStorm board at https://folknologylabs.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/a-perfect-st...:

"myStorm is the perfect combination of a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, a $1, 32-bit ARM microcontroller and a $5 versatile low power FPGA – an open hardware platform – brought to life with innovative open source software."

ElaineB 9 years ago | | |

In response to Joshu - I don't think this is a Kickstarter Campaign - I get it's two guys in the UK doing this off their own backs - and in record time - design on laptop to working board prototype in less than 2 weeks - with the pcbs made in Shenzhen China, in under a week. There on Twitter under #myStorm - if you want to check them out

cottonseed 9 years ago | | |

Unfortunately IceStorm has only reverse engineered the 1K and 8K, not the 4K.

ElaineB 9 years ago | |

In what way would it be better? Two guys doing something cool - what do you want? It's all opens source - you go make one in 10 days!

joshu 9 years ago | | |

Btw, calm the hostility - I was complaining about the context-free blog post. The project seems interesting.

joshu 9 years ago | | |

It's just a blog post without context or details on the project? Etc

CamperBob2 9 years ago | | |

If a tree grows in the forest but no one sees it, is it there at all?