anyone here have any experience with the nanoboard 3? I'm thinking about getting it for quick development of things I want to work on such as audip dsp projects, video stuff(interfacing to lcd's), playing around with ethernet, etc...
Seems like a pretty good board on the cheap(as compared to most other good dev boards) and as a lot of cool features.
While I don't feel everything on it is in any way great since everything can be done individually what is nice about it is the cost and the convience... assuming it is well put together and not a chore to dev on.
Not a comment on the Nanoboard as a hardware platform but...
How would you approach the FPGA development, use the Altium tools?
One thing that concerns me with their plug and play approach is that it's all very well when things work, but if they don't.....?
What happens when you want to develop a large custom application of your own or implement (say) an Altera SPOC system?
I'm an Altium Designer Licensee and am _very_ happy with the tools for PCB design. The pin swapping is also useful for routing out FPGAs but I'll be sticking to text files and Modelsim for my FPGA development for the forseeable future.
I believe you can use the standard development methods for fpga if I'm not mistaken. I too don't like the plug and play features as I tend to want to do everything myself(I guess I feel I can do it better, or atleast, do it the way I want. But the plug and play may be nice in some cases when, say, you want to do some video output for debugging and not worry about writing your own routines. As long is it doesn't force me to do it their way then it's fine.
The way I understand it is essentially the perepherial stuff on the board is accessed by a "library". If you don't want to use the devices then you don't use the library(or parts of it). The only issue is if the fpga project is very complex and has many devices being controlled then it might be an issue with user IO since they will be used by the added peripherals. Of course there are probably ways to make it work by adding a sort of fgpa daughter board yourself.
I'm knew to fgpa's so I think it will be a pretty good tool to get started and do all those fpga based projects I've been wanting to do... and having many tools in one convenient package. Basically I can see, for example, that when I'm doing some vga or audio dsp stuff that the touch screen lcd would come in handy assuming it is quite easy to use...
The main thing I don't like about it is that you are stuck to one specific fgpa brand but I guess with fpga's that is not too much of an issue.
If you use the AD plug ad play functionality it will be pretty easy to use, this is the bit they have right.
However, when you need to add your own functionality (custom DSP filter in VHDL ? ) you're going to have a whole load of problems (I expect).
The caveat behind me saying this is that I haven't _really_ investigated the FPGA development capabilities but from an initial demonstration don't think it's going to help me get custom FPGA work done quicker and with zero faults.
Why? The nanoboard, after all, is just an fpga hooked up to a lot of perepherials with code to use them(in a modular way I expect...a "library" with a RAD like environment). To go "outside the box" I'd imagine you would write your code as normal and plug it in. Obviously if the code is very complex and/or requires a lot of support you might start bumping up against the library code(hopefully it is not forced in the fpga).
Obviously I could be wrong but I see no reason why one would have major issues. I would expect, that if one wanted, they could completely take over the fpga and ignore all the software functionality and the only restriction then is the hard wired part(since that cannot be changed).
Depends on the project. I imagine for dsp stuff, if you do not already have a good development suite setup, it would be pretty good. I imagine, say, if I wanted to do some digital filter stuff, I just write the fpga code, plug it in and expect it to work just fine. Might have some issues with integrating it along side the library stuff(such as if I wanted to output it to the dac) but I imagine altium did a decent job in this area(it's not hard to do). The board would be worthless if any user code could not be integrated easily into the platform. Basically a toy for school children learning about electronics. If your stuck to the library then, similarly, it would be useless for any real development.
I just can't see what the point of isolating the fpga from the developer so that they are forced to use their design tools and libraries. Essentially then you just have some software layer that is ran on an fgpa and would not be any better than a computer(which can do much more for about the same cost).
What I don't like is that the fpga is fixed on the board... which I suppose means it is soldered. If, for whatever reason the fpga becomes screwed then the whole board is screwed and I imagine it would be a biatch to fix.
"You can also build your own peripheral board for your specific production applications, giving you ultimate control to develop, implement and debug your designs. Considered an extension to an Altium NanoBoard, resources on a peripheral board appear as though they are physically located on the motherboard itself.
It's worth noting that peripheral boards may be constructed with any required resources, provided the pinout requirements of the motherboard's generic peripheral board docking connector are met."
This leads me to believe that all the peripheral stuff that is onboard is simply a "library" that you can choose to use if you want. The only thing your stuck with is the limit user IO's that are not already tied to the on-board peripherals.
Of course all this is just speculation... I just expect some decent quality stuff from alitum(since IMO they have a decent reputation).
I'm in essentially the same place you are re. fpga development. I purchased the upgrade from Protel 99SE to Altium Designer 6 with the nanoboard. My current gig is ending at the end of March and I plan on spending a month or so getting familiar with Altium's 'soft design' methodology at that point. All I've had time to do so far is work through a couple of demos and tutorials, but I like what I see. At least as far as I know so far, you are not constrained to use the plug 'n play features unless you want to. You can design at the schematic level, VHDL/Verilog input, and their new C to hardware compiler. Also, even though the NB comes with one particular FPGA target (Altera Cyclone III in my case), the design process, at least in theory, claims to be portable to any target with similar resources. I'm looking forward to digging in to it when time permits. My first project is going to be a MIDI gadget that uses one of the free, supplied soft micro cores stuffed into the fpga and coded using the Tasking firmware IDE. My thought is that this will let me exercise the schematic capture and PCB tools (which I'm already familiar with), FPGA development and the embedded systems development tools all on the same project. I'll post up here with my progress. Good luck with your efforts.
Bob Stephens robert(dot)stephens(at)smithsdetection(dotcom)
Because the most important step in getting any serious amount of custom logic working is simulation, it's a _big_ part of the design development process.
It's the only way of having a realistic chance of getting anything more than trivially simple designs working. You can debug and test modules as you write them and then the top level design when it's all plugged together. This should all be done before you get anywhere near hardware.
There are a couple of industry 'standard' tools for this, Modelsim and Aldec's Active-HDL are the two I'm most familiar with. These aren't cheap.
The Altium Designer feature set...
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..says that it contains a VHDL 'simulation engine' and debugger and that it has third party support for Modelsim and ActiveHDL which suggests you might have to use those for 'significant' work.
That depends on the available "peripherals" on the soft micro, but probably. I'm still pretty much at the hand waving stage so far and will no doubt have many design decisions to make as I get more familiar with the system.
Yes, and put together a "standard" set of behavioral simulation components so testbenchs can be put together quickly. This has been the first thing I do when I've changed companies (in general the tools belong to the employer). Of course, this gets easier with time. ;-)
ModelSim, at least, is free with the free vendor tools. ISTR that Aldec is too, with someone's (Actel?). The free editions of ModelSim are limited to 10K lines of VHDL, or something like that. 10K lines is certainly enough to get going. It's all I'm using now.
There are more expensive nanoboards that allow for development on different families of chips. The 3000 was designed to be an inexpensive, quick learning tool.
I saw the nanoboard 2k was like 2k and was WTF!! But as far as I can tell there are a lot of overlap between the two. The NB 3k says that you can develop for any fgpa brand with an appropriate addon board which you can create.
We'll see though. If it's too basic and I run through it pretty quick and feel it's a toy then I'll send it back.
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