Logi-Pi board availability?

Question

Is the Logi-Pi board still going to be offered as a product? If so, is there an estimate on availability? Thx

johnbeetem · Answer

dan luttrell wrote:

So, is this going to continue to be a product? There's no info on the Valent site to say the current status. I don't want to pursue development on this board if it's not going to be available later.

Is Valent perhaps working on a replacement? An FPGA board for the RPi with a Lattice chip would be sweet...

I don't want to speak for ValentF(x), but it sure looks to me like LOGI-Pi is at end-of-life.

There are lots FPGA boards out there. Joel Williams has done a remarkable job of maintaining his Cheap FPGA Development Boards site, which has boards from many vendors. For Lattice iCE40, there's a good list at the bottom of the IceStorm Project home page.

There aren't many boards that plug directly into a RasPi. There actually is a Lattice iCE40 8K board called icoBoard but it's only available in Germany and costs at least 69 euros. XESS has a RasPi adapter for their XULA boards but the FPGA board itself is expensive (it's a large FPGA) and you don't get many I/Os. For a while it looked like XESS was going to have the iCE40-based CAT board but that seems to have fizzled.

For Lattice iCE40 I think your cheapest way to get started is still the iCEstick if you can find a suitable vendor. Olimex has a nice little board with a 1K part and SRAM for around US$26 at Digi-Key. However, it doesn't have a programmer. Lattice iCE40blink boards bring out lots of I/O.

I do FPGAs professionally so I have lots of boards, mostly Xilinx and iCE40. While I have LOGI-Pi, I rarely use it with a RasPi. Instead, I program it over JTAG using an Adafruit FT232H breakout board as a cheap USB JTAG dongle. USB is my favorite way to talk to pretty much any hardware I'm playing with. Then it doesn't matter which machine I'm using as a host.

rew · Answer

dan luttrell wrote:

So, is this going to continue to be a product?

I recently ran into a product where Farnell says: "no longer manufactured", but Mouser and digikey still have it! On closer inspection the "manufacturer order code" at farnell says it is "version B" and the others now carry "version C" of that same chip. This manufacturer is sometimes a bit dumb in choosing type numbers and this probably caused Farnell not to realize that there simply is "the same chip but a different version".... So the thing to learn from this is: As a manufacturer: do not include the version identifier into the order code.

And another thing to take away from this is to take the "no longer manufactured" from Farnell/newark with a grain of salt....

michaelkellett · Answer

For your encoder type application pretty much any FPGA would do - possibly even an ICE40. As Roger has suggested the video application is a different cup of tea altogether. The Digilent ARTY board is a good way to get your hands on a decent modern FPGA with on board DDRAM at a reasonable price ($99) The ARTYZ7 ($209) gets you a processor closely coupled with an FPGA and makes that video dream a bit more of a possibility. Arty Z7: APSoC Zynq-7000 Development Board for Makers and Hobbyists - Digilent These chips are demanding in terms of development effort and knowledge. I'm not sure why you think the Lattice tool chain is a better long term solution than Xilinx (or Altera). I've used Lattice parts for the last 10 years although I started with Xilinx when the very first FPGA s appeared. (I do mean first - the ones with 64 logic elements !!). I've recently started using Xilinx again and IMO the Vivado tool chain is streets ahead of Lattice's. For simple stuff it doesn't matter but for integrating FPGA, processors, DDRAM etc it does. MK

Logi-Pi board availability?

CPC.Farnell Availability