BrisbaneSilicon ELM11-Feather is a “microcontroller” board based on a Gowin GW1NR FPGA that is natively programmable in Lua, C, SystemVerilog, and VHDL.
Compatible with the Adafruit Feather form factor, the board features GPIO headers, a built-in debugger, a USB-C port for power and programming, and a 2-pin header for a LiPo battery. The company calls it a microcontroller board because the FPGA runs a PicoRV32 MCU softcore at up to 75 MHz with 1MB RAM and 8MB flash, programmable with Lua, and the user can also customize hardware layers with RTL code using the remaining FPGA fabric.
ELM11-Feather specifications:
- FPGA – Gowin GW1NR-LV9 FPGA from the GW1NR-9 family
- 8K LUTs
- 8,640 logical units (LUTs)
- 6,480 flip-flop
- 17,280 bits shadow SRAM (SSRAM)
- 486 Kbit block SRAM (BSRAM)
- 64 Mbit (8MB) PSRAM
- 608 Kbit user flash
- 2x PLL
- Up to 276x user I/O
- USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming
- Expansion – 16-pin + 11-pin headers for GPIO, PWM, UART, SPI, I2C; note: no analog pins
- Debugger – Based on Bouffalo BL702
- Misc
- User and Reset push-buttons
- 5x user-programmable LEDs
- Charging LED
- Hardware watchdog
- 4x mounting holes
- Power Supply
- 5V via USB-C port
- 2-pin connector for LiPo battery; built-in 500 mA charger
- 3.3V regulator with 500 mA peak current output
- Dimensions – 64.65 x 22.86 x 4.85 mm (Adafruit Feather form factor)
- Weight – 7.3 grams
From the hardware point of view, the architecture looks very similar to the Sipeed Tang Nano 9K board introduced in 2022 with a Gowin GW1NR-LV9 FPGA and a BL702 debugger, albeit the form factor and interfaces are a bit different. Another competitor is the Pico2-Ice development board, which pairs a Raspberry Pi RP2350B with a Lattice iCE40UP5K FPGA.
Beyond the affordable hardware, the main selling point of the ELM11-Feather board is on the firmware/software side. Its firmware (EmbluaOS) allows the user to execute Lua scripts from REPL (one standalone REPL per CPU core) or a program stored in flash memory. It supports standard digital I/O protocols such as GPIO, PWM, UART, SPI, and I²C, as well as interrupts, timers, and a hardware-based watchdog. Users can also reconfigure the hardware (I/O type, frequency, boot configuration, etc.) using RTL. EmbluaOS source code has not been released just yet, but you can find Lua code samples on GitHub and work-in-progress documentation on the company website.
Since some users may not be comfortable with using the command line, the company also developed the Arvore IDE to guide users through the process of creating a new project, developing new programs, uploading them to ELM11 Feather, and extending the Lua API. The Arvore IDE is still at the beta stage, but you can already find the Python source code and pre-built binaries for Windows 11 or Debian-based Linux distributions (Ubuntu recommended) on GitHub.
BrisbaneSilicon has just launched the ELM11-Feather on Crowd Supply with a symbolic $1 funding target. The board is sold for $39 with two unsoldered 24-pin headers and a USB Type-C to Type-A cable. Shipping is free to the US, but adds $12 to the rest of the world, and deliveries are scheduled to start by November 2026.
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.
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>PicoRV32 MCU softcore at up to 75 MHz with 1MB RAM and 8MB flash
>64 Mbit (8MB) PSRAM
?
The MCU soft-core runs with 1MB RAM available to the user; the FPGA comes with 8MB PSRAM.