With motors in hand, I built up a quick prototype. The X27 motors are designed to only move a small pointer. They draw so little current (under 20ma at 5v) that they can be driven by PIC and AVR micro pins directly. Soldering wires to the thin pins of...
With the PCB and parts finally back, and working pointers printed in safety orange, I started assembling. About 10 minutes of soldering later, the finished board looked greatNow I needed a face for my gauge. I broke out word for windows (I know,...
Did a preliminary BOM today and selected a few key components, incl. the Spartan 6 variant I'd like to use and the SDRAM and Flash devices (may go with a BGA SP6 package with more IO...no risk yet to the design, regardless of what I choose). All...
For those interested, I setup a working directory on git for this project (https://github.com/sfgit/FPGA_Arduino_Shield). I've uploaded a few libraries today also for the FPs and a !very! generic PCB (just the imported board shape and some parts...
Realizing I've got heaps of room on this board, I've gone ahead and tweaked my choice of Flash memory. In this case, I'm still doing SPI programming of the FPGA, though using a Spansion part (at least for prototypes...I'll try and cost this down...
Uploaded a heap of stuff to git. Working on video now. This includes two layers of top level documents that show sheet to sheet connectivity between SPI and the FPGA and also have the breakout for the FPGA IO and other various items. Added...
Uploaded the power supply design to git hub today. The supply is laid out in a way to allow either driving the system from the Arduino's 5V supply or using an external power adapter. The Arduino's 3V3 supply is tiny (very little current,...
...But it's enough for the board house to balk at, even if they can't mfg to those tolerances. Oh well, released a slightly modified Gerber to deal with some "roundingness" in the mfg outputs and ensure things are a little cheaper overall (under...
I went ahead and added feedback from the fpga DONE pin via the addition of a status LED. Also added a jumper that enables that feedback to be sent back to the Arduino board. The jumper gives the option to route the DONE pin to the Arduino...
Ok, normally I don't complain about hand soldering stuff because normally it's pretty straight forward but this was a lesson I learned years ago come back to haunt me all over again. Rule #83: Tent the vias beneath your BGAs! Especially if...
Made some updates to the design over the weekend to add LEDs, a nice dipswitch, make the silkscreen cleaner, clean up the pad arrays a bit and a lot more in the way of little cosmetic PCB tweaks. Overall some very important tweaks but in the grand...
Added step models to all of the interesting parts of the board to make things look and feel more authentic and to size up enclosures and such that I will release that you can easily 3D print. Have a look at the pic below in the project overview....
Got the new boards back from Advanced Circuits (they rock BTW...attention to detail like few others) and they look awesome. Went with black soldermask this time around and it makes things look so much cooler (much more Hackaday-chic). These...
Recently I'd gotten a fair bit of interest from folks wanting to buy or or trade for one of these FPGA boards...And I must admit, I'm not terribly capitalistic when it comes to stuff I build outside of the work context (I often find I just end up giving...
The first pass of this board was built with the Due in mind (3V3) and other development boards that I had sitting around, almost all of which *other* than Arduino were 3.3V. In planning the evolution of this however, it quickly made...