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Buying an Upduino Board

A project log for FPGA Experiments

Log book of FPGA adventures at home

tom-verbeureTom Verbeure 03/18/2018 at 05:220 Comments

I already have a BlackIce-II board, but when I learned about the Upduino boards by Gnarly Grey I had to buy one.

Version 1 is only $9.99. Version 2 is $15.99. Those prices include shipping, but to save on cost, they are shipped in a non-padded envelopes using standard priority mail.

Version 1 requires wiring up the board to an SPI programmed. Version 2 has a USB connector and the ubiquitous FTDI chip to program the thing.

I *really* like to play with these things in the evening while sitting in bed, so version 2 it was.

The board arrived about a week after ordering.

It's really a minimalistic design: ICE40 UltraPlus FPGA, SPI flash, an RGB LED, and the FTDI interface. See webpage for the full specs.

Schematic, BOM, PCB layout etc can be found on GitHub.

Also available are programming instructions, but those are only for the Lattice close source tools, which I don't have.

We'll see how well it does with the open source Project IceStorm.

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