My first FPGA steps with a Xilinx Zynq

Oh yes, I've seen that project too, very cool board! I may have to buy one even though I don't really need that kind of power

Marco Reps

I learned about Zynq when I did the Parallella Kickstarter. Sure the 16 core insane mips cpu core was interesting, but having a FPGA with an arm that can do live updates to the fpga core was way more impressive. Only problem with the Parallella is that you have to buy a separate $29 board for all the pin headers, but it gives you them all.

Paul Bruner

The ice40s are cute and very cheap and are pretty good for what they are but they're very low power. Really depends on how quickly you need things to work and how smart they need to be. The larger ice5s have reasonable amount of ram for their size but getting external memory beyond sram will be a challenge.

Loial Otter

Awesome, thanks for joining!! I've also purchased a TinyFPGA board with an iCEberg Lattice chip or something along those lines ... much better for learning an quickly testing stuff than the Zynq with its 4 minute workflow ... join the Discord server if you want?

Marco Reps

I work heavily with Lattice FPGAs. They are way less capable than the Xilinx parts and don't come with as many good cores that I've seen... but they're insanely cheap and reasonably powerful despite it. I work for KronTech and we use them in our high speed cameras to great effect. Downside: No CPU in them so you'll need to create an interface to another CPU and implement that. We've done so (GPMC bus on the Sitara processor we're using - also on the beaglebone) and it's reasonably easy to do so. Also another downside - I don't believe there's a freely available RAM core.

Loial Otter

I never worked with FPGAs, this is intimidating stuff... I will have to study quite a bit to follow you. But I really like the OSMU project.

Alex W

Nice project, thanks for sharing :-)

Asger Vestbjerg

It looks like you've made good progress.

Dillon Nichols

ungrookableness is the perfect term to describe it :)

Marco Reps

Awesome, I consider FPGAs to be some sort of dark and dangerous hoodoo, which is why I really would like to get to the stage where I can use them. More of this stuff please, and more technical details, even if it is still 11th dimension ungrookableness to me at my current level.

Morten Hanasand

FPGA for CNC? Interesting, what are the advantages over good ol parallel port?

Marco Reps

This way if I would make CNC router without much experience I'd never use FPGAs as the first step but rather something simple, stupid and cheap but well tested to check if mechanics works well ( GRBL anyone? ) and later move over to something more sophisticated.

I think everything is dependent on your experience with such a gear. I was not playing with CNC routers but with 3d printers including mechanics done by our engineer ( we were a team in small company ) and know that without experience and money to buy expensive technology it is definitely better to start with something simple and in trouble quickly become support from OSS community and when basic problems are away make our own changes - additional functions / modifications / corrections etc..

I'm working on a large CNC router table, and have opted to use a PC with LinuxCNC (hopefully PathPilot) and a Mesa FPGA card with custom daughterboard.

Rick Mann