The Colorlight I5 is a much better choice for that. It’s also a high volume and this cheap HUB75 controller board but with a plug-in configuration so they all pins can be used as input or output.
See my old blog post about it: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2021/01/22/The-Colorlight-i5-a...
I have seen some of the boards being reflashed with DirtyJTAG and openfpgaloader.
JTAG pins might dissappear from the board?
There is a video here "Pico-DirtyJTAG: Cheap JTAG Programmer! Raspberry Pi Pico for Lattice ECP5 + Icestudio":
These boards are programmed in production with SPI pins or assembled with preprogrammed PROMs.
Last month I reverse-engineered a 25 years old embedded system that controls a ground-penetrating radar, which isn't commercially available anymore. It uses ECP parallel port to talk to the radar's Rx/Tx fibre optic control unit, so I used the Mesa board to implement that part of it, hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi and put the touchscreen HMI on that.
Curious if you've played around with a MRMS-esque (Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor) approach to ingesting multiple passes on the same area to "get more resolution for free"
I'll be giving a (short, somewhat shallow) talk about this and some other things at this year's Akademy, about "Taking KDE to the Pyramids".
> Curious if you've played around with a MRMS-esque (Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor) approach to ingesting multiple passes on the same area to "get more resolution for free"
I haven't! We do have some interesting bespoke highly-stacking radar hardware, and do somewhat unusual things like complex transilluminations, but I'm really more a nuts and bolts software engineer than the actual sensor expert :-)
While I found the hardware pretty simple, HUB75 displays seem _very_ picky about over-volting. The setup is basically a simple controller (such as ESP32-Trinity) plugged directly into one HUB75 (potentially chained to a few more).
When running off of USB power it pulls the voltage down to ~4.7v and the image looks great. When running off our junky Amazon 5v barrel connectors the image gets all sorts of artifacting. Quite frustrating!
Anyhow, I can't recommend HUB75 displays enough. Toss some retro pixel art on there and it is such a nice little picture frame sized treat!
Are you sure you aren't a clanker? You seemed to have missed some critical details from my short post.
Ask chat about it! I have a pretty limited understanding of any of this shit but: I wasn't really able to find a satisfactory explanation for why we do not currently do this with doppler radar[1]. A great deal of CONUS has 3+ overlapping local/national radars from ideal angles & elevations, the smallest cell on the mosaic being ~1km felt "like bullshit/not very 2026". I don't care if the radars are nearly twice my age, they're still quite good.
With Codex 5.2 (and some preprints wrt MRMS from countries that don't even really get tornadoes) I got to the point where this 5800X3D (and 128gb of ram) could attenuate and plot all of conus about as fast as new sweeps are published, but it makes my room very hot. Now that fall is coming and the models are so much better I will revisit it. Will email you if anything good happens. Here's an old mp4 in the meantime https://i.imgur.com/EZjM46W.mp4
I'm certain if you threw Astra at it on high with a pile of slightly different scans it would do something useful.
1) This isn't something they would do half-cocked, I learned weather nerds are very serious about only presenting exactly what can be measured with known error bounds and detest anything resembling speculation