Snickerdoodle board on FLOSS Weekly

The Snickerdoodle board (featuring the Xilinx Zynq) was featured on FLOSS Weekly yesterday:

https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/360?autostart=false

An affordable platform for powering everything robots, drones, and computer vision.

Snickerdoodle is a $55 hybrid development board that has an ARM application processor with an onboard FPGA. Ryan Cousins (rcousins) cousins of krtkl (the creators) and David Scheltema (interested1) of MAKE magazine join Randal and Aaron to discuss the board.

Here's the episode on YouTube:

cheers,

drew

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johnbeetem over 10 years ago

I haven't watched the video since most of my computers don't have sound hooked up, so this comment may already be addressed in the video:

Snickerdoodle has a very impressive price for a Zynq board, but what's it doing on FLOSS weekly? Don't you have to use the proprietary Xilinx Vivado software to program the Zynq FPGA?
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gdstew over 10 years ago in reply to johnbeetem

Don't you have to use the proprietary Xilinx Vivado software to program the Zynq FPGA?

Indeed you do. Just like you need proprietary software to use any ARM SoC GPU, except for the Pi. Now if we could just get schematics for the B+ and 2.

The ARM cores on the Zynq can and do use Linux of course and its' GPU is also proprietary so like all of the others in some way or another it's a mixed bag.

And just like the GPUs, I don't really see anything in the near (or distant) future that will change the proprietary nature of business model currently in use
by all of the major. and most of the minor FPGA (or GPU) players.
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fustini over 10 years ago in reply to gdstew

I was excited to see Hackaday do a series of FPGA tutorials featuring Lattice:

Learning Verilog for FPGAs: Hardware at Last! | Hackaday
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/27/learning-verilog-for-fpgas-hardware-at-last/

for which there is an Open Source toolchain:

Project IceStorm
http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

But my understanding is that Lattice is not on par with Xilinx and Altera.
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fustini over 10 years ago in reply to gdstew

I was excited to see Hackaday do a series of FPGA tutorials featuring Lattice:

Learning Verilog for FPGAs: Hardware at Last! | Hackaday
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/27/learning-verilog-for-fpgas-hardware-at-last/

for which there is an Open Source toolchain:

Project IceStorm
http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

But my understanding is that Lattice is not on par with Xilinx and Altera.
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michaelkellett over 10 years ago in reply to fustini

Drew,

I must challenge your comment re. Lattice.

Lattice are not in the same markets as Xilinx and Altera but they do make smaller and cheaper FPGAs which are vastly more accessible to small users and projects.

Take the ICE 40 range as an example, low cost parts with industry leading low power and good functionality.

The Lattice mid range parts are competitive with the X and A mid range parts.

If you want to play with the giant SOC type parts or can afford the huge state of the art parts then X and A are the only way to go.

If you want to experiment with low cost FPGA then you can use Lattice parts (chips and dev boards) from formal sales channels or rather old Altera parts (dev boards) from Chinese channels.

I've been using Lattice parts for the last 10 years (switched from X because no one there would talk to me). No regrets.

MK
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