FPGA Journal Article

What? No traffic lights and vending machines? :-)

It's always entertaining when people pop up in various newsgroups (including this one), wanting help with their vending machine project, and insisting that it isn't homework.

Reply to
Eric Smith
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I can't claim to know the economics of hobbyists elsewhere in the world, but IMNSHO in the US, someone who can't afford to spend USD $99 on something needed for their hobby doesn't realy qualify as a "hobbyist". People routinely spend orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies other than electronics.

And yes, I remember back when I was a starving college student. Even then I managed to spend much more than $99/year on hobby items, though perhaps I shouldn't have.

One guy I knew back then complained that he couldn't afford a $100 computer (a Timex/Sinclair or the like), even though he typically spent well over $100 per month on accessorizing his sports car. It's a matter of priorities.

Reply to
Eric Smith

inaccessibility

I think it is not true. Hobbyists do not need state-of-the-art technology, they need satisfaction -- this is the key difference compared to professional electronics. For one person a simple LED blinker is perfectly enough, somebody else is happy when his three transistor AM radio is working, there also are hobbyists doing DSP using FPGAs just for fun.

The next problem is related with the lack of appropriate technologies. SMD parts were useless, because we didn't know how to produce good enough single layer PCBs at home, not to mention double layer boards. Now we have two competitive technologies (optical, based on photoactive resins and the second one, called "thermotransfer", which directly transfers the pattern from a sheet of paper printed by a laser printer onto the copper surface using a flatiron and two rags). We've even learned how to make precise two-sided PCBs using that technologies. Now the SMD components in TQFP/SO/TSSOP are no longer a problem. But we still don't know how to solder BGAs and QFNs...

I think that kits are a big misunderstanding, because you just need to connect provided parts as described on a provided diagram. Even a chimp could do it. The trick is to design the device yourself, from scratch. It needn't be perfect, it sometimes produces smoke, but it's _yours_.

Hmm, really? ;-) As far as I know the only "pure" hobbyists here are Antti and myself, the rest is more or less professional.

Hard to obtain in small quantities...

But they do not provide free simulators, so they are virtually useless for hobbyists.

hobbyists.

Well, I hope it's useful... . :-)

Best regards Piotr Wyderski

-- "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" -- Seymour Cray

Reply to
Piotr Wyderski

Real/Complete programming information would be a very good start to a new hobby phase. But I think that all the FPGA vendors are too scared to give out this information. Come on, xilinx, altera, etc, etc. What could there possibly be so secret in the format for how to program your parts? :)

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Reply to
Tobias Weingartner

But you want something for kids to build when they're young, before they're capable of designing something themselves. Lots of us cut our teeth on the 50-in-1 sets and Heathkits.

If a kid between the ages of 8 and 15 asked me how to get started in electronics, I'd:

1) send them to Ramsey Electronics
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which makes nice, relatively inexpensive kits of varying complexity. 2) ask them to get off my lawn. (Sort of obligatory at my age.)

Bob Perlman Cambrian Design Works

Reply to
Bob Perlman

I can think of two ideas.

One is an audio digital delay. A CODEC, some analog for the front and back ends, a rotary encoder, some buttons, an LCD and/or some LEDs for the user interface, an FPGA for the delay engine and the logic to handle the user interface, and a couple of SRAM chips for the delay memory. The delay engine is a pair of address counters and you need a state machine to handle the memory access, and a couple of shift registers to do the I2S interface. Hell, while you're at it, add a digital input level meter and blink some LEDs.

A second is a simple logic analyzer. Of course, the hard part here is writing a Windows (or Mac OS X or Linux) host program.

-a

Reply to
Andy Peters

USB seems like the obvious choice, but I don't think any of the low cost demo boards support that.

Some of them have VGA connectors. If you have a spare monitor you could do the display output in the FPGA too.

RS-232 is probably good enough to have a lot of fun. 115K works fine with not-long cables. 1000 points is a reasonably size. If you have 8 channels, that's 8K bits. Under a second.

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Reply to
Hal Murray

I agree that electronics as a hobby is not as vibrant as it has been in the past, but not on your time line or for your reasons.

My theory is that the decline started no earlier than late 80's and has not really recovered. But the projects that are now created are far more complex than those of yester year, but at a level comensurate with the technology available today.

The decline has little to do with Radio Shack and 50-in-1 kits. While it is probably true that most electronic hobbyists have at some time owned and played with these kits, there are probably far more that had these kits, and after a few hours, they were put away never to be used again until passed on to some younger cousin. These kits were way too limited, had fairly poor educational content, and no direction as to how one might expand, experiment, and learn more.

My theory is that the decline in the late 80's was driven by several things that started in the early 80's:

- Reasonably cheap personal computers with sufficient software that hobbyists that may have become electronic hobbyists, instead became software weenies. The open-source movement now extends this to colaborative projects that are very challenging, and include the opportunity for others to use your work, and to get recognition for your contribution. I am not criticising the O-S movement at all here, just pointing out that it is an alternative path for potential electronic hobbyists.

- Many of the things that electronic hobbyists used to build could be purchased complete and working for less than the raw components cost. There is not as much fun in building a 7 transistor radio that has mediocre reception in a cardboard box, versus a buying a walkman for the same price. Other projects just are not possible, such as build a CD player or cell phone.

- Many of the components that you might want to buy that are used in commercial products were not available to hobbyists.

- Many of the challenges that may have enticed an electronic hobbyists are now replaced by toys such as playstations etc.. that consume vast amounts of what would have been hobby time. Electronics as a hobby requires significant study to be able to do interesting projects. 150 channels of TV probably don't help either.

- Mentors are in short supply. I think the pressures of work have increased (because electronic work projects are more complex) so the pool of mentors is diminishing. Their hair is getting thinner and grayer too.

- Specialization. As the electronics profession has grown over the last 25 years, the amount of new stuff is such that few if any can master (or even be reasonably competent) in multiple sub-fields. This affects the mentor pool, and also the breadth of available literature that might guide a starting-out electronic hobbyists. This was driven home for me about 10 years ago when I met with a world renown Verilog expert, who had no clue that a 74LS74 was a flipflop!

- Minaturization of packaging makes some products un-useable by hobbyists, or requires much higher levels of enthusiasm. Surface mount made the older wire-wrap no longer an easy solution for projects, as the availability of wire-wrappable sockets is far more limited, and the latest packages such as QFN and BGA are beyond almost all hobbyists. I am not saying that this kills the hobby, but it certainly raises the bar.

FPGAs on development boards

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go along way to allowing any hobbyist to start playing and experimenting with FPGAs, HDL, simulation, hardware design and interfacing to the real world. Best of all, there are many low priced boards available, and all of the software for the low end products are available free to anyone with a computer and an internet connection (and a few gig of disk space).

While this re-enables electronic hobbyists to work with current technology, and pursue it with tools that are similar to what professionals are using, I don't think this is going to get anyone to put down their XBOX-360 and start writing VHDL.

This group is full of them. I've been an electronics hobbyists for over 40 years. Sometimes I get to be paid for it (employment), and sometimes not.

Cheers, Philip Freidin

Philip Freidin Fliptronics

Reply to
Philip Freidin

On 12 Jan 2006 12:15:13 -0800, Kevin Morris blurted:

I don't feel qualified to comment on the dark ages, but in the last several years have moved from the software side into hardware. I keep a blog about some of the stuff that I'm doing

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& read this group regularly - understanding about 5% of it. I am playing w/ a Digilant Spartan3 board, & when the Xilinx software doesn't crash, am making slow progress in understanding how to move from, say a hardware-based ethernet, to one designed w/ logical tools.

I don' get paid for this stuff - it's just very cool. My wish is for more tutorials & even more access to free software (Chipscope for more than 60 days for example), as buying all of the ancillary tools, chips, hardware, scopes, probes, etc. can get expensive after awhile.

My $.02, Tom

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Reply to
spammersarevermin

Well, I guess I would be one of those "rebirth" hobbyists. I am younger and just "discovered" the fpga. I was under the impression that things like this were very expensive, but when I see starter kits for $150, I had to snatch one up and try it out. For the last 5 months I have been feverishly programming and learning with Webpack 7.1 implimenting different ideas on codecs, processor cores, and so on. Now I that I have a handle on whats available and possible on most platforms I bought my first dev board a couple of days ago. I can't wait for sun to open up there sparc cores. So many ideas so little time!!

I can't believe I went through my undergraduate education without trying fpga's out, and my focus on RF and optics was not very close to VLSI or control. After 5 months though there are a ton of optics processing problems that can be sped up with fpgas. Like I said, can't wait to start debugging!!

So much to do, so little time... new Hobbyist

Reply to
Hahnsolo

"Hahnsolo" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

no need to wait for sun

commercial quality SPARC core and system on chip library is available now

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you need XC3S400 or larger (better larger) to implement a SPARC based system

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Reply to
Antti Lukats

There are many of us here who started out as pure hobbyists, but then grew our passion into a paying endeavor. I started out in the mid '70's first with dissected radios, tape recorders etc, whatever I could get my hands on, with radio shack kits (many of which I heavily modified...one that comes to mind was a regulated power supply where the 2N3055 got hot enough to melt through the red plastic board/box that soon got a heatsink and a darlington pair for more output current and a switch to select output voltages). From there, I started getting into logic. Between a 1976 Signetics IC databook (which is still on my bookshelf) and several of Lancaster's cookbooks (some of his circuits would never get past a critical review, but they were great for learning) I taught myself digital design. Even built a couple of computers based on the then brand new 6800 (on an Ohio Scientific board), and then the Z-80 scratch built on wire-wrap boards before graduating from high school in

1979.

Like Philip said, I had a mentor (a friend of the family who is an EE and was consulting mostly in audio and telephony back in the 60's and

70's) that gave me much of the motivation to make and improve on the projects in Radio Electronics (which I was subscribed to from 1971 to 1982, I dumped the entire collection when it caused me to exceed my weight allowance in a move with the Air Force, Killed me, but I couldn't even give them away).
Reply to
Ray Andraka

Indeed. I don't get it either. How much can be reverse engineered from a bitstream format? This closedness is a real hindrance to the development of an open source eco-system around FPGAs.

Any university open FPGA architectures being developed out there? While it's probably too late in the game for a new FPGA company to enter the race, it's possible that one of the smaller, hungier players might be able to differentiate themselves by opening up their bitstream formats.

Phil

Reply to
Phil Tomson

Nostalgia... I built radios in high-school days, and was a ham operator during college years. Later, in Sweden, I designed and built power supplies and sold a hundred of them as a moonlight operation. Then the usual audio amplifiers and speaker boxes. Now the interest is rekindled and I play with the design of my second-generation programmable clock module (1 Hz to 2.5 GHz with, hopefully, 30 ps jitter). But this also taught me that, for top-notch performance, you need the help of several friends and experts (software design, pc-board lay-out, GHz trickery, test instrumentation) and of a commercial manufacturer. We built a few hundred of the first generation "X-Pod", and are using them inside the company on many test benches. So it's more "skunk works" than hobby activity, but still the same fun. I have toyed with the idea of a storage scope. The digital part in an FPGA plus external RAM looks easy. But less than 500 MHz sample rate seems to make it a toy, and at that rate the A/D becomes quite expensive, and an input attenuator looks forbidding, But there are neat examples of using the PC for display and control. Peter Alfke, from home.

Reply to
Peter Alfke

Digits of precision & granularity ?

But this also taught me that, for top-notch

A tad outside the average hobbiest resource pool ?

We built a few hundred of the first generation

Yes, scopes are dominated by things other than the FPGA, so are not ideal demo-examples.

My favourites would be for Xilinx to do a split a) Freq Ctr & Signal Generator - Smallest/Cheapest FPGA version

b) Freq Ctr & Signal Generator - Money-no-object version

FreqCtr's can become quite complex - so a series of designs would show users more and more, but still have a HW platform that is i) FPGA dominated ii) Clearly ahead of any uC alternative

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

10 decimal digits fixed-point display, but 2 ppm accuracy. Above 1 MHz limited by time base accuracy, below 1 MHz by display (just because we are too lazy to make the display floating point...)

I think so.

Yes and no. For low-performance, most complexity would be in FPGA, DRAM, and PC.

Wait for the S3Eeval board. It includes a freq.gen design based on my box. Ken Chapman did the control for both of them (PicoBlaze-based), so you can be convinced it is good. But it only goes to 80 MHz (?) and the jitter may be more than 100 ps, since he has no PLL to clean it up further.

I am going for 2.5 GHz square wave, 1 Hz resolution, and lowest jitter. But no arbitrary function, adjustable amplitude or duty cycle. All those things are possible, but clutter up the design. Maybe there will also come a USB-controlled derivative that offers more freedom.

Please tell me what people need a frequency counter for. I have thought of a design for years, including reciprocal counting at low frequency for high resolution with short capture time. But it died for lack of interest. We could of course include something in the S3E eval board.

The S3E eval board accuracy will be limited by its 50 ppm xtal, and the resolution might be pushed to almost 1 GHz. Display is no problem @ 2 x

16 digits. A 20 times more accurate time base would cost
Reply to
Peter Alfke

Those do sound like the Smallest/Cheapest and 'other end' I was talking about. Why stop at 1Hz ?

When I say 'Freq Ctr' that is short hand for the higher end Freq Ctrs. The better ones ( we use a venerable PM6672 here... ) can do much besides simple frequency.

I'd start with the simplest gated counter designs, and then work up to Reciprocal and Time-Interval counters, ..maybe Phase too.

A small nudge, and you can make a SigmaDelta ADC display section, as that's really a % counter.

One idea I have, is for a Dual Readout Recip Counter : A fast update readout, where the precision is the normal trade off of update speed. The second would accumulate precision, so the longer the probe is held there, the more digits you get.

That gets a little tricky, as the whole system has to never drop any edges.

Uses: As a software development tool, to verify correct settings. Common errors are the off-by-one in divisiors etc.

Mostly 2 channel Time-interval, but also frequency.

Talking of looong ago, I think my first film-processed project was a compact 8 digit Freq Ctr, with many old fairchild part numbers. That was before rubylith....

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

It is easy to go to mHz, just make the accumulator longer, but why? With 1 ppm absolute accuracy, even the Hz is dubious above 1 MHz. Who is interested in frequencies below 1 MHz? That also goes for the counter.

Jim, you seem to overestimate the time and energy we here can expend on sophisticated and increasingly specialized appliations. That's why I stay with a basic, but extreme design that gives us some real usefulness and also some bragging rights.

There are always more urgent projects breathing down our necks: Verifying, testing, finding problems and work-arounds, write documentation, plan the next generation, prove SEU hardness, deal with unhappy postings on the newsgroup, give seminars, attend conferences, analyze the features and find the shortcomings of the "other guy", support Markeing, but prevent them from exaggerating... Life is never dull, often challenging, and rarely really frustrating. Peter Alfke

Reply to
Peter Alfke

I've never worked with any "exclusively logic designers". (At least I don't think I have. Maybe one snuck in that I didn't notice.)

There is also the other end of the spectrum: firmware/drivers/software. For most projects that I've worked on, that's a cricital part of the big picture.

You could also expend up to system architecture and stuff like that.

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Reply to
Hal Murray

"Phil Tomson" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@enews4.newsguy.com...

Phil, Atmel AT40K/AT94K bitstream format is almost open eg it is available under NDA from Atmel, and open source reverse engineered documentation is also available - no NDA :)

As of BIG FPGA companies making their bitstream format public - do not hope!

because the bitstream holds not only the 'known' bits like routing and LUT, but also factory stuff

bits that compensate against technology changes, those are 'figured out' by actual measurement by the FPGA companies AFTER wafers are manufactured that is the FPGA companies makes their chips to have a little 'fine tuning' to be done, this fixing is done by bitgen and is totally invisible for the normal user.

second there are factory test bits and settings, again something that the end user should not mess up

there are some hidden FPGA primitives that are partially visible for the end user but not useable by end user, like PMV primitive in V4 and S3

there are probably hidden features and primitives that are totally invisble for the end user as well.

so there are reasons for keeping the bitstream non public.

for Xilinx and Lattice the main bitstream info is in NeoCad "BFD" files, those are simple ordered lists of bit names, bitgen uses that info to convert an NCD to bitstream

NCD file is almost 1:1 the same as the XDL file would be so actually pretty much of the bit info is visible for those who want to see

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Reply to
Antti Lukats

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