laser engraving the lid and other plans.
#6
(10-25-2017, 02:19 PM)machinehum Wrote: I would be interested in helping with the ICE40 design. How far alone is project ice storm now?

It would be really interesting to get a ICE40 on board to do things with CSI and other high speed realtime peripherals.

Icestorm seems to be doing just fine. Unfortunately I don't think it has the luxury of all of the nice tools like Xiinx chipscope. It will synthesize and do place and route which is a huge step forward for the FPGA community. 

At the moment this project is just in the planning stage. I was mislead by the small board schematic showing a PCIE lane going from the SOC to the small PCB. Looking further at the main board schematic I realized that this is not the case, and instead those differential lines are used for HDMI. This leaves USB as the only high speed bus available for communicating with the SOC, which means that the requirements for the FPGA are quite relaxed. It seems that ICE40 would fit the bill nicely, because we should be able to build firmware directly on the pinebook without having to resort to an x86 host and a jtag programmer. The programmer and general purpose communication with the SOC could share the same USB port as shown in this project, which keeps the BOM low. 
 
I am dealing with some midterms right now, but in about a month I will start working on the schematics. I think my plan right now is to reuse the HDMI port as the digital IO for the FPGA while preserving the usb port, but if the space constraints are too complicated I may omit the USB port as well.

Anyways these are just some thoughts,  if you would like to get involved PM me and I will give you a link to the github once I set it up.


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RE: laser engraving the lid and other plans. - by bits_and_wires - 10-26-2017, 04:23 PM

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