I have tried to look for something like this, so bear with me if there is something that Google did not show me!
Is here a plan to make an FPGA-shield?
The Arduino is perfect for our students to play with and to try simple logic like digital filters, but there is not room, and maybe not speed, for a larger FIR-filter.
I do not need any fancy high-speed thing that can do everything. Not an FPGA with a soft-AVR, just plain FPGA on a board that fits on an Arduino.
This is not the same use.
With a micro-controller you can only do one operation per clock cycle.
With FPGA you can toggle several hundred gates in one single clock cycle.
You can use asynchronous or synchronous logic, it is impossible to do the same with a micro-controler.
There have been several FPGA "shields" for Arduino on various crowd-funding sites, but none of them seem to have caught on very much, and most seem to be no longer available. I'm not sure that it makes much sense; a bit like putting a rocket engine on your tricycle. You'd probably be better off with one of the fpga vendor's more standard evaluation boards - if you are doing stuff with FPGA-level complexity, connecting such a board to an arduino (if you have any reason to do so) should be relatively easy...
AVR to FPGA is quite a leap. Have you considered Arduino Due?
So, that is what the quote is for...
I have checked this thing, but it is unclear top me what it really is.
They refer to it as a shield, but it seems as they are trying to emulate the Arduino with a soft AVR inside the FPGA. But there may be something I miss.
westfw:
There have been several FPGA "shields" for Arduino on various crowd-funding sites, but none of them seem to have caught on very much, and most seem to be no longer available. I'm not sure that it makes much sense; a bit like putting a rocket engine on your tricycle. You'd probably be better off with one of the fpga vendor's more standard evaluation boards - if you are doing stuff with FPGA-level complexity, connecting such a board to an arduino (if you have any reason to do so) should be relatively easy...
We have FPGA development boards, and I also prefer the Altera ones for their software. It is easy to get started with for the students. But an FPGA development board is something different than an Arduino shield.
These students are in their second autumn. They bought their own Arduino when they started and know it very well. We want to give them experience in interfacing a micro to a digital system like an FIR-filter. They shall design the handshake logic and the filter.
The Arduino is already available. We just add another tool to it. Of course you can do much more with an FPGA, but we don't need that yet.
We could do it the old way with 7400s and PCBs, but I would prefer not.
While I can't speak for the Arduino official team, I feel relatively confident in saying that an FPGA shield is not really compatible with their company "mission" of serving a less experienced user community.
You should probably use one of the existing 3rd party shields, put up with a less elegant interconnection to other-format FPGA development board, or design something yourself.
Hi Guys,
Before I ask my question, I just became a member and I'm an absolute beginner so forgive me if I'm saying sth may be stupid or in the wrong place. My apologies upfront
I'm eager to learn about FPGAs. I was wondering if anyone knows what this link is all about?!
Is it worth buying?
My main area of application will be algorithms. So I need storage to store variables and also should read them from storage but I really don't know anything about FPGAs and of course very little (if it counts!) about arduino
Am I able to program it with usb? it says it has
also does it have storage? I am saying some stuff here that I have NO knowledge/clue about so please forgive me. I appreciate if you correct my mistakes
There are many affordable entry-level FPGA boards which include on-board USB-JTAG programing interface, but the one you cited above does not, i.e. with that board you'll need an external JTAG programmer which will cost you from $20 to $50 extra, plus some nerves and luck to get them working together.
Perhaps you might wish to look at the list of the FPGArduino supported boards for which we have prepared pre-built Arduino-SoC bitstreams, some of those cost less than $45 and include on-board USB-JTAG such as the Lattice XP2 Brevia-2 Kit or the ULX2S board.
