The Ultimate Project Kit?

The industry has moved away from this direction but I'd like a dev board that featured a modern ARM micro that brought out a substantial parallel bus to a header.  Then I'd like an FPGA daughter card with a mating header.  The idea would be to decode the bus in the FPGA and create a custom peripheral.  What can I say, PC104 left an impression on me.

I'd skip the micro and just use some kind of Zynq. And since it's the "ultimate" project kit, we'd want to be able to easily add 100G ethernet, Wifi 9, PB of Infineon memory, ... at least an FPGA gives us some hope of evolving for future interfaces. Plus we'd want to be able to hook multiple mainboards together into a (Beowulf :-) cluster.

Really the problem with anything "ultimate" is either it can evolve into something still useful in a hundred years, or it will be dated a couple years after it's set (so not really "ultimate", or even "penultimate").

Anyway on a more serious note, if it's not reconfigurable, (i.e. like an FPGA) then I think it will miss the mark of really broad applicability.

I contemplated having something with an embedded hard processor in the FPGA like a ZYNQ, but ideal or not, I wanted to keep cost and complexity down.  For instance the FPGA board would be one of those QFP-144 types that sell for less than $25.  A couple of years ago I designed an FPGA daughter board for Cyclone IVE and Cyclone 10 devices.  I did not design any mother boards though.

This little display board is about as near as I get to a universal board. It is powered by a GigaDevices ARM processor and has serial ports for control.

I've used it in a few projects, and it's going to be used in some more. The little 128x64 Oled displays are nice.

I recently did a re-spin of it for a customer with an ST ARM processor, a small Lattice FPGA and differential line drivers and receivers for the FPGA to talk to position encoders and work its magic on them.This is nicer package and has USB C for serial comms and/or power as well as logic level UART.

The Lattice FPGA is quite nice to use and reasonable to solder in this 48 pin QFN package - they get much less nice if you need more pins because Lattice only do them in very fine pitch BGA. I like that Altera still offer a lot of their parts in TQFP packages - I wish Xilinx would. (I'm getting cheesed off with calling them Intel and AMD (and of course Altera is back to being Altera now)).

MK

I like the way the varient you designed sounds.  ARM micro with Lattice FPGA in QFN package is just what the doctor ordered... and OLED is gravy.  My kind of kit.

I like the way the varient you designed sounds.  ARM micro with Lattice FPGA in QFN package is just what the doctor ordered... and OLED is gravy.  My kind of kit.