which states: "No Longer Manufactured". The European site says: Available until stock is exhausted
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...
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.
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....
There are 2 primary tasks: 1) read AquadB outputs of several encoders (these would be A, B, and index pulse buffered down to 3.3V) at speeds up to a few MHz (typically less than this) and generate position data, 2) read image data from a color camera (need R, G, B color planes separately) at perhaps 20 fps.
It looks like the RPi would be a good platform to analyze and record the data once the fpga has it available. I'm thinking the Wolfram Language is appropriate for that task. That's why I'm interested in the RPi with an fpga.
I've been using a National Instruments cRIO and programming in LabView, but there is a serious bottleneck where digital inputs are brought into the fpga. I need another solution. I'm not an fpga programmer but been playing with a small Xilinx board to get a feel for difficulty and issues. It works ok. Appears the Lattice tool chain might be a better long term solution.
Thanks for the info on boards. Very helpful! I've looked at some of these and will search for the others. I'm sure there's an appropriate solution in here somewhere.
It does look like the Logi-Pi is end-of-life, but I'm also finding that vendors don't always update their web sites with the most recent info. Hoping to find someone here who can enlighten us on the status of the ValentF(x) products. Valent hasn't answered my direct inquiries.
Thanks for the info on boards. Very helpful! I've looked at some of these and will search for the others. I'm sure there's an appropriate solution in here somewhere.
It does look like the Logi-Pi is end-of-life, but I'm also finding that vendors don't always update their web sites with the most recent info. Hoping to find someone here who can enlighten us on the status of the ValentF(x) products. Valent hasn't answered my direct inquiries.
