$69 miniSpartan6+ Board with Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA Features an HDMI Port (Crowdfunding)

I’ve already featured sub-$100 Xilinx Spartan 6 boards in this blog such as The Mojo and Arduissimo. There’s now another with Scarab Hardware‘s miniSpartan6+ which also includes an HDMI port, and is currently available for $69 on Kickstarter. This board could be used as a logic analyzer, a multimedia player, a game console emulator, an Arduino emulator, a stereo vision camera, and more.

miniSpartan6+ specifications:

FPGA- Xilinx Spartan6 LX9
System Memory – 32 MB SDRAM
Storage – 64Mbit SPI Flash + micro SD card
Video Output – HDMI
Audio Output – Stereo audio output jack using 1-bit sigma-delta DAC
USB – Micro USB OTG port
Debugging – On-board USB JTAG programmer
I/Os via breadboard friendly through holes
- 8-channel ADC running at 1 MSPS with 8 bit resolution.
- 24 Digital I/O pins.
Misc – 8 LEDs.
Dimensions – 4.57 x 7.62 cm

Programming can be done with the company’s Scarab IDE, which still requires Xilinx ISE Design tool, and allows you to develop, compile, and download programs to the FPGA through the on-board USB JTAG programmer. The IDE comes with Verilog/VHDL libraries and .bit files to program common tasks such as HDMI output, or logic analyzer. If you don’t feel it using Scarab IDE, you could as well just use Xilinx ISE Design Tool if you’re used to it. The project will be fully open source, and the developers claimed the schematics, the source code, all the libraries will be available for download.

As mentioned in the introduction, a $69 pledge should get you one miniSpartan6+ board, delivered to your door in September 2014. Shipping is free to the US, and $10 to the rest of the world. Other pledges are also available if you want your board earlier, or want more than one.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.