Precursor is a mobile, open hardware, dual FPGA development kit (Crowdfunding)

Precursor mobile open-source dual FPGA devkit

Sutajio Ko-usagi PTE LTD has launched some interesting hardware on Crowd Supply over the years include Novena open-source hardware Arm laptop, and Fomu FPGA USB board. The company is now back with another project: Precursor, a mobile, open-source hardware devkit powered by not one, but two FPGA with Xilinx Spartan 7-Series FPGA, plus a super-low-power Lattice iCE40 UP5K FPGA for deep-sleep system management. The device also comes with a display, battery, and keyboard that make it looks like older Palm or Blackberry phones. Precursor FPGA devkit specifications: FPGA Xilinx XC7S50 primary System on Chip (SoC) FPGA with -L1 speed grade for longer battery life; tested with 100 MHz VexRISC-V, RV32IMAC + MMU, 4k L1 I/D cache Lattice Semi iCE40UP5K secondary Embedded Controller (EC) FPGA for power, standby, and charging functions; tested with 18 MHz VexRISC-V, RV32I, no cache System Memory – 16MB external SRAM Storage – 128MB flash Display -536 […]

Vision FPGA SoM Integrates Audio, Vision and Motion-Sensing with Lattice iCE40 FPGA (Crowdfunding)

Vision FPGA SoM

tinyVision.ai’s Vision FPGA SoM is a tiny Lattice iCE40 powered FPGA module with integrated vision, audio, and motion-sensing capability with a CMOS image sensor, an I2S MEMS microphone and a 6-axis accelerometer & gyroscope. The module enables low power vision (10-20 mW) for battery-powered applications, can interface via SPI  to a host processor as a storage device, comes with open-source toolchain and sample code, and is optimized for volume production. Vision FPGA SoM specifications: FPGA – Lattice iCE40UP5k FPGA with 5K LUT’s, 1 Mb RAM, 8 MAC units Memory – 64 Mbit QSPI SRAM for temporary data Storage – 4 Mbit QSPI Flash for FPGA bitstream/code storage Sensors Himax HM01B0 CMOS image sensor Knowles MEMS I2S microphone, expandable to a stereo configuration with an off-board I2S microphone InvenSense IMU 60289 6-axis Gyro/accelerometer I/Os 4x GPIOs with programmable IO voltage SPI host interface with programmable IO voltage Misc – Tri-color LED, […]

Radiona ULX3S Open Source Hardware ECP5 FPGA Development Board Launched for $99 and Up (Crowdfunding)

ULX3S Lattice ECP5 FPGA Educational Board

Last summer, we wrote about Radiona ULX3S education board combining a Lattice Semi ECP5 FPGA with an Espressif Systems ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth WiSoC. Designed for a digital logic course at the University of Zagreb, the board is open-source hardware with KiCAD hardware design files released on GitHub, and programmable with the Arduino IDE (FPGArduino) and ProjectTrellis open-source toolchain. At the time, there was only a version based on Lattice ECP5 85F with 84K LUT, but they’ve now made versions with cheaper variants of ECP5 FPGA and launched the board on Crowd Supply. Radiona ULX3S specifications: FPGA (one of the other) Lattice ECP5 LFE5U-85F-6BG381C with 84K LUT Lattice ECP5 LFE5U-45F-6BG381C with 44K LUT Lattice ECP5 LFE5U-12F-6BG381C with 12K LUT System Memory – 32MB SDRAM @ 166 MHz Storage – 4–16MB Quad-SPI Flash for FPGA config and user data storage; MicroSD slot Audio – 3.5 mm jack with 4 contacts (analog […]

Lattice Introduces CrossLink-NX FPGA for Edge AI & Embedded Vision

Lattice CrossLink-NX FPGA Lattice Semiconductor has announced the first product associated with its Nexus Platform, the CrossLink-NX FPGA designed for embedded vision and Edge AI applications. There are two offerings at this time, the CrossLink-NX FPGA 17, and the CrossLink-NX FPGA 40. Recent Announcements The Nexus Platform was introduced at the beginning of December 2019, and now CrossLink-NX has been developed and is being manufactured. The first announcements of Lattice Nexus Platform and The CrossLink-NX  Product Family came as the company’s moved to capture the embedded vision systems market. The Standout Features The low-power consumption, low soft error immunity, and 10Gbps MIPI are highlights of the CrossLink-NX FPGA. Other features include Instant On, with IO configured in 3 ms, and a total of 8 ms for the device. The Cross-Platform FPGAs The trends in technology are leading to devices that can cross function in a number of different tech environments. […]

PrinCube Said to Be Smallest Handheld Smartphone Color-Inkjet Printer That Prints on Anything (Crowdfunding)

PrinCube the smallest, color-inkjet printer on the market. PrinCube is a portable handheld color ink-jet printer that is palm-sized, wirelessly controlled by a smartphone, and easy to set up. The IndieGoGo campaign has exploded to more than $2,000,000.00 USD and featured on a number of tech sites.  Article Intent For clarity and function of the PrinCube abilities, there needs to be a careful examination of the facts that surround wireless, handheld, color inkjet, printer, that can print on any surface. Other Handheld, Smartphone, Color-Inkjet Printers There is another product, similar to PrinCube, PrintBrush, which is also a handheld wireless color inkjet printer, connected to a smartphone. It should be noted that while PrinCube is a very popular campaign, PrintBrush, which came out earlier than PrinCube, has very similar claims.  It is worth looking over the websites for both printers Here are the campaigns PrintBrush XDR- Colors Everywhere on Kickstarter PrinCube […]

ULX3S Education Board is Powered by Lattice Semi ECP5 FPGA & ESP32 WiFi/BLE Module

ULX3S Lattice ECP5 FPGA Educational Board

A few days ago, we covered the KiCAD designed OrangeCrab open-source hardware board powered by a Lattice Semi ECP5 FPGA, and compliant with Adafruit Feather form factor. It’s turned out there’s another Lattice Semi ECP5 FPGA board that’s also designed with KiCAD and open source hardware. Radiona ULX3S differs are it’s larger and exposes more I/Os since it was specifically designed to meet the meets of the digital logic course at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) of the University of Zagreb in Croatia. ULX3S specifications: FPGA – Lattice ECP5 LFE5U-85F-6BG381C with 84K LUT System Memory – 32MB SDRAM @ 166 MHz Storage – 4–16MB Quad-SPI Flash for FPGA config and user data storage; MicroSD slot Audio – 3.5 mm jack with 4 contacts (analog stereo + digital audio or composite video) Video – Digital video (GPDI General-Purpose Diferential Interface) with 3.3V-5V I2C bidirectional level shifter Display – […]

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

Lattice ECP5 Feather 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. 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 […]

Amungo NUT2NT+ is an Open Source High Precision GNSS Board (Crowdfunding)

NUT2NT+ GNSS Board

Amungo Navigation NUT2NT+ is an open source hardware four-channel, all-frequency, GNSS RF-to-bits receiver for precision, satellite-based positioning. Connected to the right antennas, the board can achieve centimeter positioning resolution by connecting to multiple navigation satellite systems including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and IRNSS. Amungo claims that while several startups and large companies already offer proprietary GNSS positioning solutions NUT2NT+ is the only open source option in this class of GNSS devices. NUT2NT+ key features and specifications: Receiver chip  – NTLab NT1065 4-Channel RF Front-End IC FPGA – Lattice ECP5 with 12K LUTs + 28 DSP blocks (LFE5U-12) opened for custom design USB – 1x USB 3.1 Type-C port via CYUSB3014 USB 3.0 controller: Clock – 10 MHz TCXO, soldered RF inputs – 2x bands dedicated;  – 5 dB referred noise floor ADC – 2-bit resolution up to 99 MHz Samples transfer – Continuous full stream, from 10 to 50 Mbytes/sec […]

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