ICE40

iCE Bling: Beautiful LED Earrings with Lattice iCE40 FPGA

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has created wondeful LED Earrings with the Lattice iCE40UP5k FPGA and shared the project on our website:

iCEBling

Screenshot from 2020-07-19 14-10-16

Find out more about the project in this blog post:

ice-bling-sm-1-1024x683

iCE Bling FPGA – Beautiful LED Earrings with Lattice iCE40

It’s the same story every year. At the horizon is a loved one’s birthday, or an anniversary, and I want to make them something special. Buying something won’t do. Oh no, I have to design and build it myself. I would then start with a simple idea, and then complicate it progressively to the point where it would take several anniversaries to finish the project.

This time, I wanted to build a pair of earrings for my wife’s birthday. Since I am learning about FPGAs these days, I wanted to incorporate one into the design. Having gotten older and wiser, I decided to enlist help early on. I would focus on the overall design and the programming part, and leave the PCB design and assembly to my trusted friend and engineer Siva.

 

iCE Bling: Beautiful LED Earrings with Lattice iCE40 FPGA

iCE40 FPGA Board for the Raspberry Pi

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Matthew Venn has created a FPGA dev board based on Lattice iCE40 8k for the Raspberry Pi.  The board uses our After Dark service which features clear solder mask on a black substrate:

board

FPGA dev board based on Lattice iCE40 8k

Aim

  • Make my first PCB with an FPGA
  • Keep it super simple and cheap
  • Configured by on-board FLASH or direct with a Raspberry Pi
  • 6 PMODs, 2 buttons, 2 LEDs, FLASH for configuration bitstreams.

What a Lattice iCE40 FPGA needs

  • A clock input. Has to be provided by an oscillator, it doesn’t have a crystal driver.
  • 1.2v core supply for the internal logic.
  • 2.5v non volatile memory supply. Can be provided via a voltage drop over a diode from 3.3v.
  • IO supply for the IO pins, different banks of IO can have different supplies. This design uses 3.3v for all banks.
  • Get configured over SPI interface. This can be done directly by a microcontroller or a computer, or the bitstream can be programmed into some FLASH, and the FPGA will read it at boot. If FLASH isn’t provided then the bitstream needs to be programmed at every power up or configuration reset.
  • Decoupling capacitors for each IO bank.

PCB

BOM

  • FPGA iCE40-HX4K-TQ144 (8k accessible with Icestorm tools)
  • 3.3v reg TLV73333PDBVT
  • 1.2v reg TLV73312PDBVT
  • 12MHz oscillator SIT2001BI-S2-33E-12.000000G
  • 16MB FLASH IS25LP016D-JBLE (optional).

Test

See the test program. This makes a nice pulsing effect on LED2, and LED1 is the slow PWM clock. The buttons increase or decrease pulsing speed.

make prog

Yosys and NextPNR are used to create the bitstream and then it’s copied to the Raspberry Pi specified by PI_ADDR in the Makefile.

Fomu-Flash is used to flash the SPI memory, or program the FPGA directly.

 

iCE40 FPGA Board for the Raspberry Pi

iCEBreaker FPGA: new video streams and new content

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https://twitter.com/esden/status/1249917248795340800

An update from our Dorkbot PDX friend, Piotr Esden:

iCEBreaker FPGA: new video streams and new content

iCEBreaker Production

As you read in our last update in November, we finished fulfilling the campaign, but that does not mean work on iCEBreaker has stopped. We keep producing iCEBreakers and Pmods to keep 1BitSquared US and 1BitSquared DE, as well as Crowd Supply and Mouser, stocked.

For those of you who are patiently waiting for your shipments, don’t worry. A package with additional inventory is going out to the Mouser warehouse today!

Continuing Work on iCEBreaker

We are continuing work on new examples and additional iCEBreaker hardware. If you are not following 1BitSquared or Piotr on Twitter, you might have missed some stuff that Piotr is working on. Since January, Piotr started streaming on Twitch on a fairly regular basis. You can follow him on Twitch and be notified every time he goes live. Piotr is also announcing upcoming streams at least a day in advance on Twitter as well as on the 1BitSquared Patreon page.

As a result of the Twitch streams, we’ve had a few interesting new developments for the iCEBreaker platform. A few weeks ago, we published Litex RISC-V SOC generation examples that you can find in the iCEBreaker GitHub Organization. Piotr gave a Twitch stream presentation about the build system and how to use it. You can watch the stream Archive on Twitch, diode.zone, and YouTube. This example gives you the foundation to create your own SOC for the iCEBreaker, start adding your custom hardware to the RISC-V core, and program it in C or Rust. We are also working on MicroPython and maybe even CircuitPython support in the not too distant future.

Upcoming Twitch Stream

Piotr has scheduled a Twitch Stream for Tuesday, April 13th, 2020 at noon PDT. He will be working on a new Pmod for the iCEBreaker that will allow us to connect NES or SNES controllers from two very popular 8-bit game entertainment systems. 😉 That same Pmod will also contain a stereo audio output. This Pmod together with a DVI output, LED Panel output or VGA output will be an ideal combination to recreate old or build new custom game consoles and a wide range of emulations, for entertainment, preservation, and education.

electronics-lets-play-stream

If you are curious when the stream will happen in your timezone you can either check on Twitch itself, as there is a countdown timer till the next stream below the video streaming window, or you can check timeanddate.com.

Keep Supporting our iCEBreaker work

If you like to see continuing work and content creation for the iCEBreaker platform, and you already have all the hardware you need, then consider supporting us through Patreon. We keep adding perks for Patrons, like KiCad panel templates and behind the scenes news. We have a few very generous supporters that make the Twitch streams possible, but any additional support is appreciated.

Stay in Touch

And don’t forget, the continuing development and support for iCEBreaker keeps on rolling on the 1BitSquared Discord server, and iCEBreaker forum! So join the fun and show off your iCEBreaker projects! 🙂

Stay safe and healthy,
Piotr and Danika

iCEBreaker FPGA: new video streams and new content

iCEBreaker, The Open Source Development Board for FPGAs

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From  on the Hackaday blog:

iCEBreaker, The Open Source Development Board for FPGAs

The Hackaday Superconference is over, which is a shame, but one of the great things about our conference is the people who manage to trek out to Pasadena every year to show us all the cool stuff they’re working on. One of those people was [Piotr Esden-Tempski], founder of 1 Bit Squared, and he brought some goodies that would soon be launched on a few crowdfunding platforms. The coolest of these was the iCEBreaker, an FPGA development kit that makes it easy to learn FPGAs with an Open Source toolchain.

The hardware for the iCEBreaker includes the iCE40UP5K fpga with 5280 logic cells,, 120 kbit of dual-port RAM, 1 Mbit of single-port RAM, and a PLL, two SPIs and two I2Cs. Because the most interesting FPGA applications include sending bits out over pins really, really fast, there’s also 16 Megabytes of SPI Flash that allows you to stream video to a LED matrix. There are enough logic cells here to synthesize a CPU, too, and already the iCEBreaker can handle the PicoRV32, and some of the RISC-V cores. Extensibility is through PMOD connectors, and yes, there’s also an HDMI output for your vintage computing projects.

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BeagleWire: fully open ICE40 FPGA BeagleBone cape

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BeagleWire by Michael Welling is a fully open ICE40 FPGA BeagleBone cape:

beaglewire-prelaunch-1-1_jpg_project-body

BeagleWire: fully open ICE40 FPGA BeagleBone cape

BeagleWire is a completely open source FPGA development board. Unlike most other FPGA dev boards, the BeagleWire’s hardware, software, and FPGA toolchain are completely open source.  The BeagleWire is a Beaglebone compatible cape leveraging the Lattice iCE40HX FPGA.

BeagleWire can be easily expanded by adding additional external modules for example, modules for high speed data acquisition, software defined radio, and advanced control applications. Using well-known connectors like Pmod and Grove makes it possible to connect various interesting external modules widely available in stores. Owing to this, prototyping new imaginative digital designs is easier.

Screenshot from 2018-02-26 13-26-43.png

BeagleWire: fully open ICE40 FPGA BeagleBone cape

BeagleBone FPGA cape and Google Summer of Code

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From the BeagleBoard.org Foundation blog:

Google Summer of Code project videos

Watch the introduction videos from our Google Summer of Code 2017 students including BeagleWire software support by Patryk Mężydło

Checkout hackaday.io more information on the cape:

BeagleWire

The BeagleWire is an FPGA(Lattice iCE40HX4k) development platform that has been designed for use with BeagleBone boards.

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mwelling has shared the board on OSH Park:

BeagleWire

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Order from OSH Park

BeagleBone FPGA cape and Google Summer of Code

E-Ink controller with ice40 FPGA

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eink_featured

writes on Hackaday:

E-ink Display Driven DIY

E-ink displays are awesome. Humans spent centuries reading non-backlit devices, and frankly it’s a lot easier on the eyes. But have you looked into driving one of these critters yourself? It’s a nightmare. So chapeau! to [Julien] for his FPGA-based implementation that not only uses our favorite open-source FPGA toolchain, and serves as an open reference implementation for anyone else who’s interested.

Watch the E-Ink controller in action:

Design files and source code are available on GitHub:

github-smalljulbouln/ice40_eink_controller

https://hackaday.io/project/21168-fpga-eink-controller
https://hackaday.io/project/21168-fpga-eink-controller

julbouln has shared the board on OSH Park:

eink controller

e21cd1133ba415c96eb3b15c965bc7f7

Order from OSH Park

E-Ink controller with ice40 FPGA

IceZero FPGA Board for Raspberry Pi

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Black Mesa Labs created this board that adds a Lattice FPGA to a Raspberry Pi:

ice_zero_with_pi_zero

IceZero FPGA Board for RaspPi

BML has been very much enchanted with the Lattice FPGA boards for Raspberry Pi, IcoBoard , BlackIce and IceHat. The IceZero board is a BML creation that attempts to combine the best features of all 3 boards into a single design.

screenshot-at-2017-02-11-12-23-44

IceZero features common with other designs

  • Fully Open-Source Hardware and Software Design.
  • Lattice ICE40HX4K FPGA that supports Clifford Wolf’s Project IceStorm tool chain.
  • Interfaces to Raspberry Pi 2×20 GPIO Header for both power and bus interfaces.
  • PROM programmable directly from Rasp Pi, no JTAG programmer required.
  • External SRAM, supporting soft CPU core designs ( code execution ).
  • Extra large SPI PROM, supporting soft CPU core designs ( code storage ).
  • Industry standard PMOD expansion headers

sump2_on_ice_zero

IceZero features that are BML specific

  • Mesa Bus Protocol 32 MHz SPI link between CPU and FPGA.
  • 2-Layer PCB design. Orderable via OSH-Park or Gerbers for Downloading.
  • FTDI 1×6 USB Serial Cable header for use with PC instead of Pi ( or as a soft CPU debug Trace Port ).
  • Single Pi UART plumbed to FPGA for muxing to multiple external serial devices.

BlackMesaLabs has shared the board on OSH Park:

bml_ice_zero_19_02.zip

BML IceZero Lattice ICE40 FPGA for RaspPi

db079498cc7f080afc8ce1732dc887d9

Order from OSH Park

IceZero FPGA Board for Raspberry Pi