Brewing Up a myStorm FPGA board on the kitchen table | Hacker News Reader

Brewing Up a myStorm FPGA board on the kitchen table

folknologylabs.wordpress.com

65 pointsmonsonite27 comments

I love all the FPGA boards coming out but I really wish the software was better. Lattice uses the same synthesizer as Xilinx which is well known to be completely user hostile (will silently optimize huge swaths of code because it doesn't like them). The least headaches come from Altera but that's not a high bar...

This chip from Lattice is supported by icestorm. It is the only open source FPGA tool chain.

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

And I think you'll find this is the exact reason the iCE40s are showing up in so many hobbyist projects.

I'm at my hackerspace right now. There's three people with HX8K evaluation boards at this table alone (I've got two, actually). None of us have even downloaded the Lattice tools.

I've got the HX8K eval board doing text over VGA at 1280x1024 with a simple home-etched PCB that plus into it and some very naive code, hope to hit 1920x1080... It's a lot of fun. The toolchain has some niggles, but overall it's extremely pleasant and I'm so happy it exists. I've been wanting to work with programmable logic for a few years since getting into electronics, but I've just not got along with the Xilinx and Altera tools.

If you read the blogpost on #myStorm that describes the hardware https://folknologylabs.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/a-perfect-st...

It sounds like this board is going to be available for $30 and you add your own Rasp-Pi - but the $5 Pi-Zero plugs straight in on the end of the board.

There's an ARM M3 acting as FPGA programmer, GPIO, ADC and up to 512K bytes of fast SRAM on the flip-side of the board.

For $30 that seems a bargain!

Are you somehow associated with this project? It's the only story you posted and each and every comment associated with this account plugs that board.

You might consider Clifford Wolf's Project Ice Storm - an open source tool chain for several Lattice devices - consisting of YoSys Synthesiser and Arachne Place and Route.

I think with Intel starting off on FPGAs, we might see some sanity. It's clear that those FPGAs can compute with GPGPU workloads, and depending on their adoption, we might see similar tooling.

The Xilinx synthesizer is certainly interesting. I had some fun porting a design someone else had created for I think Synplify to that a few years back, because it went and replaced a state machine crossing two clock domains with one that wasn't safe for that purpose.

the national instruments myRIO board has probably the lowest barrier to entry for FPGA programming and also microcontroller programming since it uses a zynq processor, both of which are programmed with LabVIEW. it also runs a real-time linux OS. but it isn't available to the general public, being reserved for academic use. i am not for sure why.

This would be better if there was a link to the actual product.

They have an intro to the myStorm board at https://folknologylabs.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/a-perfect-st...:

"myStorm is the perfect combination of a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, a $1, 32-bit ARM microcontroller and a $5 versatile low power FPGA – an open hardware platform – brought to life with innovative open source software."

In response to Joshu - I don't think this is a Kickstarter Campaign - I get it's two guys in the UK doing this off their own backs - and in record time - design on laptop to working board prototype in less than 2 weeks - with the pcbs made in Shenzhen China, in under a week. There on Twitter under #myStorm - if you want to check them out

> - and in record time - design on laptop to working board prototype in less than 2 weeks

Well, it looks like there are 3 chips, a usual DC-DC converter, and that's all :-)

If you search around the communities - there's an STM32duino forum where the EagleCAD design files for #myStorm have been placed http://www.stm32duino.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1276#p16407

It looks like they have 512K bytes of 10nS SRAM on the back of the board - but it's neat how the $5 Rapberry Pi-Zero plugs in at one end - some cool overall pics on Twitter if you search #myStorm

Suggesting someone search Twitter for a hashtag is not really good documentation. Maybe a link to a top level project page somewhere would be helpful.

I have been wanting to build a smaller project around an fpga so I am very excited about this, if they plan to sell it.

Unfortunately IceStorm has only reverse engineered the 1K and 8K, not the 4K.

Really? On the http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ IceStorm site - If you look carefully at the table of supported devices - the ICE40HX4K-144 is there - 2 rows from the bottom

Am I right in thinking 8K refers to the number of LUTs/cells? If so I won't be fitting the Rocket RISC-V design in one any time soon. Although it's a good start - I'll be very happy to see the back of Xilinx Vivado awfulness one day.

There is a Pico Risc-V that fits in ~2000 LUTs that can be built for the ice40: https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32 https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32/blob/master/scripts...

PicoRV32 (https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32) and ORCA (https://github.com/VectorBlox/orca) are two RISC-V implementations that nicely fit in ~2000 iCE40 LUTs. UCB-BAR V-Scale (https://github.com/ucb-bar/vscale) fits in ~4000 iCE40 LUTs.

I stand corrected. See Clifford's other comment in this thread.

There is no 4K die. The 4K chips are using 8K dies, the lattice software limits the number of usable LUTs to 4K. IceStorm will give you access to all 8K LUTs in the device.

I didn't realize that. Thanks for clarifying, Clifford!

In what way would it be better? Two guys doing something cool - what do you want? It's all opens source - you go make one in 10 days!

If a tree grows in the forest but no one sees it, is it there at all?

It's just a blog post without context or details on the project? Etc

Btw, calm the hostility - I was complaining about the context-free blog post. The project seems interesting.

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