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 […]
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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 […]
CPLD breakout board design in KiCad is based on design by Ian Lesnet of Dangerous Prototypes. This board was designed in KiCad in 3-4 hours. It is the first board we ever designed completely in KiCad. The learning curve wasn’t that steep. I’ll put my KiCad experiences together in a tutorial series soon. This is […]
Its been almost a year since we completely switched to KiCad. It was a great experience working with KiCad. No schematic page limits, no board size limits, built in online DRC and what not. The online DRC feature itself making the switch worth because we are completely out the DRC->FIX ERROR->DRC… cycle in Eagle. Yeh, […]
GNU Screen is a full-screen Window Manager that works with Serial Terminals as well. This makes GNU Screen a very useful tool to interact with Numato Lab’s USB GPIO/Relay modules and other products. Below is a screenshot of GNU Screen interacting with a USB GPIO module. With most popular distributions, GNU Screen can be installed by using appropriate […]