Group Actions
Engagement
  • Author Author: rscasny
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 4828 views
  • Likes 16 likes
  • Comments 25 comments
Related
Recommended

Who is Interested in Experimenting with a Spartan-6 FPGA? If You Are, I have 2 Boards to Giveaway for Projects

rscasny

I had a lot of interest in my giveaway for the Digilent CMOD S7 board, so I am offering another giveaway for 2 members who are interested in experimenting with a Spartan-6 FPGA. Let me tell you about the board first. image

 

It's called the Cmod S6 -- a Breadboardable Spartan-6 FPGA Module.

 

It's small, featuring a 48-pin DIP form factor board built around a Xilinx Spartan 6 LX4 FPGA.

 

The board also includes a programming ROM, clock source, USB programming and data transfer circuit, power supplies, and basic I/O devices. There are 46 FPGA I/O signals that are routed to 100-mil-spaced through-hole pins, making the Cmod S6 well suited for use with solderless breadboards. At just .7” by 2.6” inches, it can also be loaded in a standard socket and used in embedded systems.

 

Key features include:

 

Spartan 6 XC6SLX4-2CPG196 FPGA Features include:

  • 600 slices (each with 4 LUTs and eight flip-flops);
  • 8 DSP slices;
  • 216Kbits of block RAM;
  • 2 CMTs (4 DCMs and 2 PLLs).

 

Board features include:

 

16Mbyte Spansion Quad SPI Flash for storing FPGA configurations and/or user data;

  • 46 FPGA GPIO signals brought to DIP pins;
  • Two on-board clock sources;
  • 4 user LEDs and 2 user buttons;
  • On-board Adept USB2 port for configuration, test and communications interfaces.

 

Here's the datasheet:

 

https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1841742.pdf?_ga=2.84073758.603595138.1565037142-1061579168.1558457094

 

 

What Do You Need to Do To Get These Boards?

 

I'm running these as board project giveaways instead of RoadTests to give members interested in experimenting with the Spartan-6 but may not feel they have the background to compete in a full roadtest. So like the last giveaway if you are would-be roadtester who would like to build up his/her portfolio of things you have done on the community or you want to do something to learn about the Spartan-6 FPGA and get some time to improve your skills with the associated design tool, this could very well be for you. (A side note: I may very well decide to roadtest this in the future. But for now, I want to do a giveaway project.)

 

So, tell me what you want to achieve with this little board? What's your goal in learning? What would you like to experiment with? Or what kind of project do you think you would build. I'll choose the 2 most interesting ideas and send you the board.

 

Randall Scasny

RaodTest Program Manager

  • in reply to rdr91h

    Interesting course. Although I do not read Spanish, I see it looks like a contest of sorts. Seems like the Tindie store closed.

  • Last January  I finished an OpenFPGA course, https://github.com/Obijuan/digital-electronics-with-open-FPGAs-tutorial/wiki

    I used an opensource FPGA, the Alhambra board https://alhambrabits.com/alhambra/ , and I would like to try if I could use the same opensource software, Icestudio IDE https://alhambrabits.com/software/  in order to programm this FPGA.

     

    If I could´nt use Ice Studio, I would try to reproduce some of the projects I did, for example connect the FPGA to an esp8266 an a NodeRed server to voice control with a cellular a little mobile robot.

    Here there are the  practices videos :

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNUG8km3AqKS3XxZrYxd5Uw/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=0&view_as=subscriber

  • in reply to ssimontis

    Great way to recover from life. It sometimes takes many years before one finds their true passions in life. I was luckier than most because I found mine right out of college. And that was over 35 years ago. Hang tight and it will work out.

    Clem

  • Processor design fascinates me. I was fortunate enough that my extended internship at university was with a civil engineering firm which created traffic and transportation devices. Although I was mostly working in C# (we had a number of Windows embedded controllers and our central server was a C# app), I got exposed to the embedded world. As interns, we were responsible for loading firmware on all of the microcontrollers and they gave us a chance to try and fix RMAs before we shipped them off to our fab operation. There's something so satisfying about having a desk full of gadgets wired together.

    I decided to specialize in computer platform architecture and networking for my specialties within Computer Science. Unfortunately, I began having my first major encounters with mental illness at this time. I loved learning C and building circuits in Logisim, but I was also laying in bed 18 hours a day and I should have had a 0.0 in that class if it wasn't for a TA who must have been able to read between the lines and gave me extra time to complete every assignment. I wanted to show up, but I just couldnt. When I finally saw a psychiatrist, things got better for a while. I excelled at my internship. The founder of the company was very intimidating for all of the interns, he was a South African navy veteran and had no patience for stupidity or self-contentedness. He kept asking me to do projects for him, and he became less frightening. He taught me everything I know about debugging to this very day, and things were only beginning to get exciting...

     

    After I finished the extended internship, I received a call from him one night. He had sold the company because he believed that IoT and cloud computing were the future (this was 2012, for that industry he was incredibly forward thinking), and he said he'd appreciate it if I could help out with his vision too. It was kind of funny that a year ago I was terrified of this man and now we were having tea together in his living room, which had been converted into an office. I ended up writing a lot of SQL for him mostly, it was all rather boring. I was doing well in class, getting my work done, meeting deadlines, by all means I was on track to a wonderful future.

     

    That next summer, I ended up working for him full-time the entire summer. This wasn't planned, I had discovered a certain white powder at university and within three weeks I didn't have a cent to my name and I hadn't been to a single summer class. I medically withdrew from school and called him up to ask if I could work all summer because I could no longer afford school. In spite of my life spiraling out of control, I created one of my greatest creations that summer. We were in a strategic partnership with a LED sign company that needed a controller system so it would integrate into our cloud system. The sign hardware was delivered to the office, from that point onwards, it was all up to me. I chose what additional hardware would be required, I designed the data exchange format for the controller to communicate with EC2 instances, I wrote the scheduling algorithm that uploaded advertisements to the sign via cellular modem or wi-fi and tracked play counts for billing. I spent my 21st birthday working until 4AM at night so that we could ship the signs out on time the next day.

     

    Things got progressively uglier after this victory. I began having psychotic breaks. I will never know if I could have stopped the bipolar disorder if I wasn't spending every cent I had on cocaine, or if the cocaine was a way to escape the absolutely terrifying life that I no longer knew what was real. Several more medical withdrawals in school following completely mental breakdowns. I just had to make it one more year. The only CS curriculum class that I had left to take was CPU design, my other credits were all electives. The class sounded pretty awesome. You were given a textbook and a FPGA and you built a processor throughout the semester. On the first day of class we were given a test that the professor explained was generally a very accurate indicator as to if you would pass the class or not. I had evidently forgotten quite a bit about computer architecture, when I saw my grade and realized I was the only person in the classroom who bombed the assessment, I immediately left class. Every class was like that now. When I failed statistics for the second time in a row I finally decided to drop out of school. Not that I had a choice, I withdrew before they had a chance to kick me out.

     

    Here I am today, 28 years old. I wish I could say my life was perfect at this point, but everything is a mess. I'm still alive though, which should be statistically impossible, Programming has saved my life, I am pretty sure I would have stopped fighting years ago if programming didn't mean so much to me. I'm a fairly successful C# developer, but I miss those early days. It's not easy when to find embedded work when you didn't graduate and you have a record. I'm playing with IoT devices and microcontrollers again, I have a vision to fulfill. I taught myself C# and everything else I know, why can't I teach myself to get back into the embedded world? If they won't give me a job, I will create my own!

    We are several years away from that being a possibility. But I want to build that processor that I walked out on. I want to own my past, damnit. For my best friend Ross, who overdosed on heroin before any of the grand schemes we talked about many late nights could come to fruition, I want to build that CPU. I think he was the only person who believed in me that summer, that it was going to be a tough class but if I studied and put in twice the effort everyone else did, I could do it. A month later, I was calling his father to let him know that the coroner had found his body. I think I've told enough of the story that you get the point by now. There's nothing more to say in between the tears.

  • in reply to clem57

    I have read that the deadline with Azure has been extended one month ahead. At least this gives us some more breath. Anyway, today I got board 1 blinking and board 2 registered. Soon I will start blogging some first impressions, in the meantimem the challenge project is designing in my mind.

     

    Enrico