FPGA-Based Arduino in the “MKR” form factor | Hacker News Reader

FPGA-Based Arduino in the “MKR” form factor

blog.arduino.cc

38 pointsvongomben10 comments

This appear to use a Cyclone FPGA from Intel, which was previously Altera: https://www.altera.com/

It will be interesting to see how this compares to some of the existing designs based around the Lattice ICE40. The Lattice FPGA programming information was reverse engineered and this triggered a lot of interest around the open source toolchain and many boards were designed around this FPGA:

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

https://www.tindie.com/products/Folknology/blackice-ii/

http://icoboard.org/

https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/iCE40/iCE40HX1K-EVB/

https://blackmesalabs.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/icezero-fpga-...

https://www.crowdsupply.com/qwerty-embedded-design/beaglewir...

The article mentions every other chip but fails to mention Intel name. It just skips with "based on an FPGA chip". Why?

They call out every other chip with excruciating detail. This bothers me.

Are the Cyclone development tools open source?

I kind of like the idea of an FPGA-based Arduino, but I definitely wouldn't like them moving to closed source software.

This seems to be begging for an FPGA Tensorflow back-end. To my knowledge, quality speech-to-text is quite compute intensive; and can't run with reasonable latency on a Raspberry Pi Zero, for example.

Coupled with a chat-bot you could have a smart anything.

"Laundry machine, start the last program"

"Dang, Sarah, what did you do in these clothes? Smells really weird. Starting nuclear bio-hazard cleansing."

"Steeeeve, imma kill you! Why you always have to switch it to the smart-ass mode?"

Yikes

It's an interesting board for sure - it also has HDMI and PCIe... something for everyone! I wonder if they are planning to let you program the FPGA from the Arduino IDE, that's sort of hard to imagine.

Sounds like they are planning on having an app store with pre-built cores that you can load into the FPGA depending on what functionality you want. It's a pretty good model and Arduino isn't the first to try it, hopefully it works well. My guess is that normal users will mostly stick to configurable pre-built cores and knowledgeable users will probably use more heavy duty tools if they wanna build their own.

The hardware they've announced is absolutely loaded with features with an ARM uC, a dual core ESP32, a crypto accelerator and the Altera/Intel FPGA; hopefully they can keep the price reasonable. I wonder if they cut a deal with Intel to help subsidize the cost, since Intel just announced their new Xeon chips with FPGAs. I expect I'll buy one as long as it's under about $75. Only problem I can really see is that it doesn't have that many pins exposed, but that's not a huge issue.

https://hackaday.com/2018/05/18/arduino-just-introduced-an-f...

   "App store"

I guess everyone gets greedy eventually.

It's just my choice of words, I don't think they are calling it that. I doubt they're gonna focus on monetizing it any more than the library manager they already have (which is to say, not at all). You can probably buy commercial IP cores for the FPGA they are using, but I seriously doubt they will be distributing those through Arduino. I fully expect that it'll be open source modules developed for functionality appealing to makers, the Arduino people have a history of being good citizens (excepting the weird copyright controversy, but that's not the same thing). Stuff like e.g. RGB LED matrix drivers, audio DSP or computer vision that fit hobbyist projects, but which microcontrollers struggle with.

Intel has been producing low-end, low-power Cyclone FPGAs for a while -- the Cyclone 10 is their newest entry in this product line, which is what this device comes with. To my knowledge this is the first one directly paired with a microcontroller. They normally come with heavier-duty Linux-capable ARM devices, if anything. Microsemi are the only other vendor I know who offer uC/FPGA combos like this.

Anyway, they probably didn't get some kind of direct subsidy on this, but they surely got volume discounts like any other major buyer -- it's a completely, totally different class of devices than what you'll see strapped on a Xeon, low cost, and they've been selling these kinda chips for a while now, overall (Cyclone 10 LP is fairly recent, tho)

Looks very cool, I am wondering the toolchain used with this. Arduino IDE seems not to be enough. And the price...

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