Hacker News Reader

Comment by 15155 | Hacker News Reader

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803970893483.html

I've ordered trays (and they send the OEM tray) - unique barcodes, legit.

> Just give me a plain FPGA and MCU with no wizards or GUIs or automatic code generation.

You can pretty much cut out all of their tools and get a pure Yocto/Vivado TCL build for the bitstream for the 7 series Zynqs. Very low touch.

Their IO planner (in the Vivado IP integrator) is somewhat necessary for complex peripheral scenarios and is one of the few things I ever use Xilinx GUI applications for anymore.

View on HN

I was interested to see, or at least what state they're in so I grabbed a couple. Might try to compare them against some genuine ones with CT and destructive inspection.

On the chance they're half reasonable, thanks for the link.

Let me know if the barcodes are anything but unique/perfect. This has been the case with many vendors, but these chips are cheap enough that you can try 50 vendors.

Will do. Not too worried about trying low cost parts to gain some minimal confidence in a possible source, they're compelling for weekend side-projects at least.

I've previously struggled to roll the dice for higher end parts as the cost difference isn't as extreme and had some obvious reballed parts a few years ago. If they're OK then their $20 XC7K325T will be at the top of my list...

At $20, just buy from LCSC-

https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Programmable-Logic-Devic...

https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC...

That's low-end Zynq and Artix and I'm thinking more >676 Kintex, though I appreciate any discussion on sourcing.

In the way that that Aliexpress vendor lists the 7010 parts at 1/10th the price of LCSC, some of their $20-60 listings are also shockingly cheap in comparison.

Ah, missed the K! For the K420T, I pay around $30-45 from CN (not Aliexpress) sources with original barcodes (but these vendors are quite a bit harder to deal with.)

I have some obviously reballed (but well done) aliexpress XCKU5P's that I got for $55 a while back. Haven't tested yet but the price was so good I couldn't resist.

I’ve been bitten before but the risk/reward is probably worth it for parts like that.

Thanks for your write-ups btw, been following glScope development for a while.

I don’t even find Vivado that bad, but maybe I have Stockholm syndrome. Or maybe it’s because I’m forced to use Intel Quartus right now and wish it was Vivado every time.

How do you assemble your board with BGA packages? Or do you procure the parts and then send them somewhere for assembly?

Vapor phase reflow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com