OrangeCrab is an Open Source Hardware, Feather-Compatible Lattice ECP5 FPGA Board

Lattice ECP5 FPGA powered OrangeCrab is the work of Greg Davill who designed the Adafruit Feather-compatible board in KiCAD, crowdsourced schematics/PCB checking and published his progress on Twitter, and published the files  of the open source hardware board on Github.

Lattice ECP5 Feather board
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OrangeCrab board hardware specifications:

  • FPGA – Lattice ECP5 25/45/85 variants
  • System Memory – Up  to 8Gbit DDR3 Memory (x16)
  • Storage – 128Mbit QSPI FLASH Memory (Bitstream + User storage), 4-bit MicroSD socket
  • USB – Micro USB connector, full-speed direct USB connection to FPGA
  • Programming – 10-pin FPGA programming header
  • Expansion – I/O’s broken out via 30 through holes: GPIO, SPI, I2C, Analog, … 7x diff pairs, 1x single ended only
  • Misc – Reset Button, charge LED (Green:  external power, Yellow: when charging, No color: when running off battery), 48MHz Oscillator
  • Power Supply – 5V via USB port, battery header for LiPo battery + battery charger chip
  • Dimensions – Adafruit Feather form factor
OrangeCrab Board
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There aren’t any sample FPGA bitstream on Github yet, but Hackster.io reports Lattice ECP5 FPGA is supported by Project Trellis open source toolchain, and the FPGA is capable of running a RISC-V softcore.

The project is “still in development “, and it’s unclear if/when it will be available, but all KiCAD design files are there if you feel you’d like join the fun.

Via Electronics Lab

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2 Comments
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dgp
dgp
5 years ago

The photos on his twitter feed are truely impressive. Not many people work with 0201 passives and CSP for hobby projects.

willy
willy
5 years ago

I thought exactly the same. Some friends like to have fun of me when I make small circuits using 0603 or occasionally 0402 with my soldering iron, but here it’s way beyond that. And the result is perfect!

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