(Development/Hacking/IoT) Single Board Computers


notaz said:
Yeah especially with Cortex A53s which is Cortex A7 performance class, in other words not far away from r-pi2.
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True, but it can run AArch64 and the price of PINE64 is lower than a RPi.
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pmprog said:
FPGA/ARM combo board. I'd like to get into FPGAs a bit more.
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yeah, so do I. I'm fed up with all that ARM SOC clones. I learn about VHDL a long time ago but finding a good ARM/FPGA single board not too expensive is pretty hard. I was interested with $99 Parallella Desktop but you cannot buy it outside USA at this price (Dig-Key and RS have prohibitive prices for the same board).

pmprog said:
It's a shame the FPGA and ARM don't have a shared memory block, it would be great to be able to push data back and forth between the two cores quickly
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I think you should be able to share the DDRAM on some: well maybe you need to add a HDL component for that.
 
hlidegp2x said:
I think you should be able to share the DDRAM on some: well maybe you need to add a HDL component for that.
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Admittedly, I've not checked a lot, but the ones I have seem to have separate memory for the two cores.

Depending on your use-case, this combo might suite you
http://www.modmypi.com/beagle-board/boards/beaglebone-black-rev-c-4gb-pre-installed-debian
http://www.modmypi.com/beagle-board/capes/logi/logi-bone-fpga-dev-board

It's close to what I was thinking about; I think you can program the FPGA from the ARM, and you can also transfer data between the two - but only 1 byte at a time; though the site (http://valentfx.com/logi-bone/) does say:
The LOGI Team has developed software and drivers that make it easy for users to communicate between the FPGA and the Beaglebone. APIs and Wrappers have been written that allow easy access to the FPGA custom hardware peripherals using the wishbone bus standard. Applications can easily be written using C,C++ in conjunction or with python. APIs for these languages allow easy to use and high bandwidth communication with the FPGA
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So maybe I've missed something.
 
Stumbled upon this today


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StopPlayingKidz said:
Stumbled upon this today
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Looks pretty interesting, however, their $3,000 goal worries me though, as well as their comment that you'll get it by the end of January. That seems a crazy short time-frame, and also not a lot of money to buy kit and manufacture them - unless this is another "CHIP" which is just using KS as a marketing tool
 
Chinese manufacturer: they likely already have everything they need, they just need a few thousand to rent a factory for a couple days to build them.
 
pmprog said:
Admittedly, I've not checked a lot, but the ones I have seem to have separate memory for the two cores.

Depending on your use-case, this combo might suite you
http://www.modmypi.com/beagle-board/boards/beaglebone-black-rev-c-4gb-pre-installed-debian
http://www.modmypi.com/beagle-board/capes/logi/logi-bone-fpga-dev-board

It's close to what I was thinking about; I think you can program the FPGA from the ARM, and you can also transfer data between the two - but only 1 byte at a time; though the site (http://valentfx.com/logi-bone/) does say:

So maybe I've missed something.
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As I have a RPi2, I thought about LOGI Pi but I have some doubts about the ability to share DDRAM.

Otherwise there are several solutions envolving Zynq Z7010 or Zynq Z7020 (no GPU/VPU though):

1) Z-turn board : http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502. Not the only one but the cheapest I found with some peripherals like HDMI, Ethernet, etc.

2) ZynqBerry : http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/detail/index/sArticle/2411/sCategory/188. This one has the same factor as a Rasberry Pi but it has only 64MByte LPDDR2.

Normally the dual ARM Cortex-A9 and FPGA can share DDRAM through AXI in those Zynq-7000 SOCs.

My dream is to have a ZynqBerry using a Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC with decent DDRAM capacity (more and less like a PINE64+FPGA) :
- Application Processing Unit : Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 MPCore up to 1.5GHz
- Real-Time Processing Unit : Dual-core ARM Cortex-R5 MPCore up to 600MHz
- Graphic & Video Acceleration : GPU ARM Mali-400MP2 up to 667MHz, Video Codec supporting H.264-H.265
- Dynamic Memory Interface : DDR4, LPDDR4, DDR3, DDR3L, LPDDR3
- High-Speed Peripherals : PCIe Gen2, USB3.0, SATA 3.1, DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet, SD/SDIO

But its price would be too much expensive I guess.
 
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That is important news, you should have put that on a separate thread...
 
It looks like it was already reported and removed.
Indiegogo responds a lot faster than Kickstarter.
 
Looks like Onion are bringing out the Omega2, it's on Kickstarter

Looks pretty neat, esp' the plus version with sd card slot! I just don't know what I'd actually use it for :-(
 
Ok, now THAT is the device I wanted. The ESP8266 was fun but difficult to use and not enough RAM. For a couple bucks more I get a full Linux environment? YES PLZ!
 
I know this thread is kind of old, but I think it's still kind of relevant

Here's a PiZero-sized FPGA board. Can run Minimig (Amiga), Next186 (Intel x86 system).
Here's the Hackaday project link too
https://hackaday.io/project/13048-flea-ohm-fpga-project


WizardStan said:
Ok, now THAT is the device I wanted. The ESP8266 was fun but difficult to use and not enough RAM. For a couple bucks more I get a full Linux environment? YES PLZ!
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Did you get an Onion Omega2? I did, but I've still yet to try and do anything with it.
 
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pmprog said:
Did you get an Onion Omega2? I did, but I've still yet to try and do anything with it.
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I did. It proved very useful at work the last few days, so much so that they're ordering in a couple more for other projects.
We needed some kind a router that could bridge wired and wireless networks for a mobile computing platform. We have a 3rd party telemetry device which only does wired ethernet, a laptop to run the server, and a tablet for visualizing. The visual needs google maps, unfortunately, so to add to the mix we needed cell data. Our original solution was a wifi router that could act as a repeater: tether to a cell phone, connect the telemetry system via ethernet and the laptop and tablet via wifi. Best router we could find with repeater feature was $250, so instead we got a $50 router and used my Omega2 with an ethernet adapter as the cell modem to router bridge.
This morning I realized it could run node.js, and has a built in web server, so I mounted a USB stick as extra storage, got node working, copied our server code over, and now it's doing everything the laptop was doing. Would've been easier if I'd had the ethernet extension but I didn't think I'd need it, so had to build the kernel module from source. By which I mean I got my co-op to build it from source, that's what they're there for.
On my way out the door I realized that without needing the laptop, the only other piece of networked equipment is the tablet: connect the telemetry to the Omega2 directly with a crossover cable, connect the Omega2's and tablet's wifi to the tethered phone, ditch the router entirely.
I could probably take it one step further if I'd gotten the cell modem extension but also never thought I'd need it.
And that's the story of how a $5 (technically $40, once all the parts were accounted for) 20 square cm board replaced a $600+ giant trunk-based rig.
 
WizardStan said:
And that's the story of how a $5 (technically $40, once all the parts were accounted for) 20 square cm board replaced a $600+ giant trunk-based rig.
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That's a neat story. I think I was originally looking to use mine to help me build an indoor positioning system, but we managed with some really cheap repeaters and some pi zeros. Worked pretty well, but our infrastructure guy was whining about how WiFi signals interfere... blar blar blar... "you're screwing up my network", so it's no longer running.

I guess it's going to end up like a few of my other boards, where it's just wasted money. I'd love to do something with it, but have no idea what. Still have a Teensy 3.1 that I originally bought to make an Amiga600 keyboard to USB keyboard adapter, then just bought a KeyRah.

Guess my hardware projects shouldn't be any different to my software projects, all of which are going nowhere either. It's so depressing.
 
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