Serial ports were used in a verity of applications reliably for a very long time now. Although PCs and Laptops don’t come with built in serial ports anymore, serial port interface emulated over USB is very popular among DIYers/hackers and with certain products. USB specification defines a class (Communication Devices Class) for using USB transport […]
Some readers may remember, we attempted to design a Spartan 6 based FPGA development board with DDR SDRAM almost a year ago. The board worked to the most part except that some obvious mistakes made it impossible to get the DDR up running. We did another attempt this year to design a new board with […]
Introduction Designing and building an FPGA development board that has two BGA devices was challenging enough. But what came next did seem equally challenging to us in the beginning. That challenge was testing the functionality of the DDR interface. We had no prior experience of successfully building a board with a DDR device. And those […]
Rohit at Technology Realm recently did a cool job of interfacing the Xilinx CPLD Breakout Board with a 16×2 LCD module. He used Chipmunk JTAG to download bitfile on to the CPLD. Thanks Rohit for sharing this excellent blog post. Read the complete blog post at his blog “Technology Realm“.
Rohit Singh put together a nice tutorial on designing an 8 bit counter using VHDL. Complete article is available at http://technologyrealm.blogspot.in/2013/06/8-bit-binary-counter-using-vhdl-on.html
Its been a while since we promised about a low cost JTAG hardware for hackers. Other priorities kept us away from working on this for a long time. At last, after a few days worth of coding and debugging, Chipmunk JTAG is now ready to roll. This is still a work in progress. There are […]
We designed and published a Xilinx Spartan 6 based FPGA development board a few months ago and gave away a few bare PCBs as well. Since we didn’t have plans to make it a sellable product, it was sidelined for a while. But many readers did like the board and wanted to know if we […]
We designed a CPLD breakout board many months ago based on Ian Lesnet’s CPLD breakout design. Like many other CPLD/FPGA platforms, you need a JTAG programmer/adapter to program the onboard CPLD. Many of the JTAG programmers out there that supports Xilinx CPLDs seems to cost a couple hundred dollars at a minimum. One of the […]
For those who ordered Spartan 6 + ATSAM, here is the schematics and PCB layout. As mentioned earlier, this board is never assembled or tested. There are some known issues with the physical boards distributed. The SUSPEND pin of the FPGA is left floating, and may cause problems during configuration (this is fixed in the […]
I sure don’t need to introduce Arduino here, it had been in the hackerspace limelight for a long time now. If you ever noticed their hardware design at arduino.cc, all of them are designed in an excellent PCB design software – Eagle. Here at Numato, we had been pondering about drawing schematics and designing hardware […]