Hi. In this video, we're going to take a look at a couple of affordable Fpga starter kits to get you into Fpga So what I've got here is a couple of basic entrylevel Fpga kits Uh, three. On the top here are sub $100 uh boards that allow you to get up and running. This is the Uh Pilio one um XY Linkx based uh Fpga board uh, similar sort of uh style to an Arduino thing.

You can connect Wings on here and uh, stuff like that, you can even get an Arduino compatible softcore processor to program inside this thing. and this thing's earn under 50 bucks. and it's got a, you know, a a decent zyink Fpga on there. Uh, then we've got this uh tur Asic uh Deo Nano board and this one is an Altera base board and it's a nice little uh compact thing like that.

This one is is uh, $89 uh us? I Think it's as little as $49 for us uh students, so that one's quite reason. Quite reasonably priced and we've got the digilent basis. 2 It's an out uh sorry, a Xyl Linkx uh compatible. like the pilo.

1 it's got a Spartan 3E uh, same as what's on the pilo there and uh yeah, it's a neat little Uh unit. This one only costs around $79 or $59 uh student price so not bad at all. It has a VGA output as we'll take a look at and then we have a higher end one which is the Uh Micro Zed Uh board and it's Xyl Linkx partner with Avet And yes, this is the exclusive Dave Jones Edition Beauty If you're going to get this, get the Dave Jones Edition one. Trust me.

And uh, this is basically a um, a Xyl Linkx Uh, but it's not one of their Spartan ones, one of the lowend Spartans It's one of their, uh, really modern high-end Zinc ones and this is an incredibly powerful board. $199 uh for this board. but it can run embedded Linux and you know I think it comes actually pre-programmed with embedded Linux and it's got Ethernet and the whole works. So quite a really Powerful Beast And we'll take a a look at that in more detail as well.

So take a look at the Pilio board here. Just an example of what's required Bare Bones to get this thing up and running. Uh, once again, this is a fairly fine pitch quad flat pack chip, so it's not something you can just immediately mount on a breadboard. For example, we need an external oscillator to make the damn thing work.

Then we need our platform flash memory connected to it so that, uh, it can store our programs when we remove our power. Uh, we've got multiple voltage Regulators up here: 1.2 volts, 2.5 volt, 3.3 volts. Therefore, all the various core voltages required by this particular particular Xyl Linkx Spartan 3 Fpga. And then we've got the USB interface here.

I Mean you don't necessarily need this. You could have just had a JTAG header on there and just plugged it straight in and then used an external Uh JTAG programmer for that. but this one. But all of these boards have uh USB built in so you can just connect them straight up to your PC and that's what you want.

And if you do want to program these things yourself, which yeah, it's a great thing to do. I Highly recommend it. Just watch out for all the traps for young players. you can get the external programmers in this.

Cas JTAG Programers Zyink Do this one the platform: USB Cable This one's fairly cheap on eBay Not as cheap as the Altera ones. This is not a genuine one. This is actually a ripoff one and so is this: Altera Uh, USB Uh, Blaster one. You can get these for like I Think this one is like something crazy like $8 delivered or something ridiculous like that.

So um, our Tia Um does seem to have a lower Um entry point uh, price As far as the Um JTAG programmer tool goes, that supports that is supported by the official Uh manufacturer software. Now the two major players in the market. Well, in fact all the Fpga players in the market, but the two main ones are Zyink and Altera. They all offer free tools and as you can see on this uh basis too, it's advertised that you can use the free CAD tools from Zyink the in this case, the ISC web pack.

It's a massive download of course, but it is completely free and Zyink have uh, and uh, sorry Altera have uh their version as well for free. but the free versions of the tools don't necessarily support the higher end Fpgas So that's why. if you're going to get one of these boards, you have to ensure that it is, um, suitable for use of what? What? Whatever Fpga you choose, you have to Ure that is compatible with the free tools. Otherwise, you'll be paying a fortune for the Fpga tools.

now. this Pilio 1 Uh is an open source, some Hardware type uh platform, but it is very basic. It's I don't think it's going to be as sort of, you know, hand holding as some more of the uh uh sort of kits from more of the uh, mainstream providers. Brief look at the Deo Nano here.

I rather uh, like this really compact little form factor nice. uh .1 in headers on here and well, let's actually uh, there's some stuff on the bottom, memory and bypass and things like that and also another header on the bottom to plug it into stuff mounted on standoffs. Neat little uh, self-contained unit and uh, as I said, it's got a alter Cyclone 4 Fpga It's got a USB interface. It's got an E prom.

It's got uh, what? have we got? Four dip switches? Uh, it's got an accelerometer built on. Fantastic. if you're in your accelerometer stuff, it's got an ADC in there. Uh, what else have we got? We've got two push buttons 40 pin GPO headers 32 M of SD ram fairly chunky amount of SD ram in there.

Um, and it's got a Serial uh prom to program, the well to hold the Uh configuration program and eight lead. so not a bad little board I don't mind that at all. The other really good thing about the Deo Nano comes with the software um, so you don't have to download it and most importantly, the Altera complete design Suite the uh. free package cuz this is absolutely huge.

As you can see, it's on a DVD as can be multi- gigabytes to download, uh, the various packages from the manufacturers this one supplies it for you, the others don't and the basis two board. it's much larger than the Deo Nano. There's a comparison there. uh .1 in um female headers along here, so not as many um IO as you get on the Deo Nano but you do get more uh, nice big, chunky uh switches and uh buttons.

We've got a four-way lead display here. you can have it as a clock. What? I really like is that it's got a VGA output and that's really quite nice cuz one of the best examples for an Fpga is being able to interface to a VGA monitor because you can pick up VGA monitors from the garbage room for nothing, right? People throw these out. But they make great interfaces for Fpga projects, so this one allows you to experimen.

uh, off the bat with that. so that's really quite good at the expense of, uh, some Iio along here. But um, yeah, once again, it's got the platform flash memor, multiple clock sources once again uh zyink Spartan 3E this time instead of the alterior part and it's got a PS2 uh port on it as well. and um, you can get modules that actually plug into this.

this was I'm not sure of what type or how much they are, but anyway, you can plug those suckers in. but I Really like this one because it's got a VGA output you can experiment with and presumably some example programs to drive the VGA this much more upmarket microzed Uh board. $199 one um, unfortunately, doesn't really come with any IO like usable IO Of course it's uh, designed to have uh, you know, embedded Linux It uses the um high-end Zinc Fpga really neat. It's got a build-in arm uh 9 processor really powerful thing runs embedded Linux I think it's already pre-programmed with it out of the box.

we have to power it up and uh, have a look Ethernet interface of course, but all of the Io here is on the bottom. It's got an SD micro SD card on the bottom. All the Io here is designed to plug into a rather expensive IO board which I uh don't have wasn't uh provided with this thing which is a big bit of a bummer. It's a really big board which I'll post a photo of right now that just breaks out all of the Io into handy uh, usable stuff.

So if you're going to get one of these I'd recommend you. Um, spring the extra and get that IO board I Stand corrected. This sucker contains two, not one, but two, one gig 1 GHz folks Um Cortex A9 um Hard Processor Calles in there as well. Of course as all the Fpga uh fabric as well.

It's got two 1 Meg sample ad converters as well. So really powerful board that one. So if you're looking to run something inside a traditional uh as a like inside a traditional processor, you know these hardcore ones are better than you know. The soft cores you can program into any almost any Fpga as long as it's got enough um, enough.

Gates Inside enough room in there. you can program, um, various different types of softcore processors into these things. but you know, something like this dedicated Arm 91 GHz processor in there cannot be beat. Uh, really, it just absolutely kills any softcore processor that you can uh, program into any other Fpga Fabric And also, you don't want to piss away your Fpga fabric inside these things with the softcore Pro processor.

Like, you might put a softcore processor in here, but it might use I Don't know. Um, just as a guess, you know it might use that 10 or 20% of your Fpga space depending on, uh, what type of processor it is. don't to waste it and they're usually not going to be very quick like the Fpga itself, for example, might be very, very quick. but when you uh, compile in not the correct term, but we'll use that today.

Um, and Fpga uh, core soft core into this thing it can't run. You know, at nearly that speed, you can get them to run at tens of mehz 50 MHz Maybe. So this certainly won't be a complete tutorial in how to you know, set up and run these things I Basically won't show you anything I'm just going to install it and get them running and that's the whole idea. How easy is it to get these things running? I'll just tell you in the end I won't show you all the horrible steps to it.

So we'll start out with the Deo Nano and uh, that of course has the Altera um Cyclone part on it. So we're going to install the uh, thankful the software comes on that DVD We didn't have to download it however big it is, however many gigabytes, we're just going to install that. So here we go install free package and well see what pops out the other end. When you install it, you have the option to install like Quartus 2.

You have to install that. It's the free web Edition It is the actual Suite of tools for all the Fpga stuff so there's no getting around that. But you can also install the model Sim uh as well. and that's just uh, simulation stuff and most beginners probably don't need.

Sim So if you want to save the 2.7 gig, you certainly can and that only took 23 minutes. That wasn't too bad. I guess can be a lot worse than that. Trust me.

and well, no. I don't wish you to talk back. enable sending, talk back. No go away anyway.

Um, it's finished and it installed. As you can see, well, it installed all the different families down here, not just the Uh Cyclone 4 I think which we needed installed. You know, Stratics real high-end stuff. ARA and all those what the Fpga is this garbage Altera Software install.

It started thrashing the CD drive and locked up. This was after it set it installed and everything was hunky dory and this just goes on and on and on forever. You're got to be me and on the other CD that comes with it. Uh, there's no install file or anything like that.

There's just, uh, some subdirectories with all the stuff. There's uh, various demonstration programs. Oh look, my first Fpga That sounds neat. There's all the files for the um.

alterior quarter, uh, staff ADC stuff. And yeah, there's the accelerometer by the looks of it, so that one looks, uh, quite neat. And then we've got uh, the data sheets with the um, uh, all of the various Uh parts. That's pretty handy.

and uh, we got the schematic. Fantastic! And we can load that up in Bingo. There it is and we're can have a look at how they've implemented this thing. There we go.

Not sure what package they've used to use that it's not Alum but uh yeah. Once again, they've done all the separate pages. This is very common for these Fpga vendors. It sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so great.

That's how they've implemented the Uh configuration prom, and the J tag interface and everything's just spread over a couple of pages here, so that is a little bit annoying. But uh, but there you go. They give you all the complete schematics which you will need to um interface this thing and you notice. Here's all the power supplies: 3.3 volts, 2.5 Vols 1.2 Vols for the various cores on the Fpga Cuz these Fpga can be a real pain in the ass.

Now according to the Quickstar guy, we can just run one of the demonstration programs here, a batch file in here after installing our Uh Quarters 2 software which we've done and uh, Bob's your uncle should download and everything's right. because these Fpga tools are actually command line tools. You don't have to use the goys um, and in fact, You know that's how a lot of third party tools integrate with these Fpga tools as they're all command line driven. So let's go in there and try it.

G Sensor: Here it is demo batch and because there's no batch file in there so we should have to just run test bat I guess and see if it works. Does it work? Demo? No what? There was some red thing there I saw it a fail and that error message was that it hadn't detected my uh USB Blaster because this board has that USB Blaster uh Functionality Compatibility: uh built in to the board as I showed before you could buy for like $8 that external programmer it's buil in. but look it. Um yeah, it just didn't install properly.

a it's supposed to do that when you install the Altera quarter software. You got to be kidding me. All right. I Manually installed the drivers there in the usual location in the quad software under SL drivers qu/ driver USB Blaster and did the usual Windows thing.

So one more time for the dummies, here we go. Test Bat Woohoo! Look, it's doing it. It's doing it. It's doing the business.

Oh it's doing something. Uh my leads are still uh flashing. by the way that um uh, lead. um you know Night Rider type thing.

Um came out pre-installed with the board which is really quite nice. Oh there we go. Looks like it's done. It worked.

a treat. Beautiful! W and get over that driver issue. Not a problem. Thumbs up and yeah, check it out.

We are in a command line interface I mean look I can go CLS and it actually clears the screen. Hello command not found. Now this uh, certainly won't be a tutorial on how to use our TI Quads 2, that's for sure I Just wanted to show that we can actually load our project into that and all I did was double click on the project file within that uh demo subdirectory that accelerometer sensor we just ran and Bingo! Go here. It is loaded into Qualus 2 and there's our source code.

Fantastic! And if we wanted to, of course we can just modify our demo program. Then we can go over here and actually, uh, compile the thing. We can analyze, synthesize, fit, and then program the device down there so we can just double click on analysis. Do you want to run the task again? Yep, here we go.

It's going to go through analysis and synthesis and yeah, it was successful. There's six warnings, not a problem so it all just works. Total Logic elements. There we go.

Used only only used 189 logic elements total. Uh, dedicated logic registers, total registers 112. not much at all. Then we can do the same thing for the place and Route here we go I'm uh, it's almost complete there and should successful.

Four warning error messages: Total logic elements used look less than 1% of what that Fpga is capable of. Total pins, all that sort of jazz, beautiful total memory bits and total Plls used. it's using one PLL There's four uh, phase lock Loops within this Fpga and uh, there you go. That's a handy little summary.

and there's a million different uh things and resources we can check and things like that. One neat one is the resource utilization by entity. Here you just go into analysis and synthesis and it can give you all this sort of info. but this basically tells us how many logic elements in our Fpga are being used by each particular uh, very log uh routine there within our program over here, so that's rather neat.

Let's try a more media project. I've opened up that Nios embedded uh, core, uh, demo program and I've done the analysis and uh, plac and Route on that and uh, it didn't take that long and uh, look here it is. summary of that after the plac and Route I've only used 26% of our um, you know, cheap ass Fpga to run that softcore. It's run external Dam and everything else so that's not.

That's pretty good. You know, on a low-end cheap ass board like this I like it. Now there's a million one neat different things we can uh do with all the tools built into this thing. but uh one.

I Really like is the Power Analyzer. Now after we run the assembler down here, then we can go up into our tools and well, sorry, there's a whole bunch of tools. There's a million One tools we can do logic, analyz, signal tap. Oh good stuff.

Anyway, uh let's go to the Power Play Power Analyzer tool and we can run that I've already. Uh, run that and we can go to the report here. Hello! McFly Come on, go into the report. There it is simulates the whole thing, tells us how much power that program is going to be running.

And here is Total Thermal Power Dissipation 282 Mwatts to run that Ni Softcore processor there. So you know that's pretty neat. And here's a summary of the results: Uh 315 M Total Thermal Power Disip for that. Uh, Nios call there.

but we can go in and we can get, uh, all sorts of things. Uh, total power dissipation by block types. We can get power dissipation by hierarchy here. Come on, this is slow as a wet week.

Oh man. I'm only running a 2 GHz core I7 here. Not sure what's going on. maybe it's my screen capture in the background, but all these breakdowns of all the power dissipation? Fantastic stuff.

And you can even get an estimate of what current is going to be drawn here from each of the individual power rails. The V like the Iio that was based on a I think it was a 12 a half% toggle rate or something like that. so it's just an estimation. but Vcca, Vccd, the internal power dissipation, the static current fantastic, and of course one you're definitely going to want to.

Well, you're forced into um, when you're doing Fpga one of the big things is of course ass signning pins cuz the pins can do many different functions. So uh, our Tira Quars 2 has the Uh pin planner here and um, this one's obviously already loaded up for this particular project and this particular device. here. the EP 4C blah blah blah.

And you can see for the BGA part, all of these ridiculous um symbols for the pinouts. But you can go go in there and you can form groups. the dam where the Dam's connected to and the Gpios and the keys and the leads and the switches all for. and you can create your own new groups and things like that which then you can assign into your Uh into your Verog Vhdl program to uh, you know, uh to access your IO and things like that.

So here's all our pins, all of our individual pins, and we can set the Io standard here. We can change all that, and we can do all all sorts of weird and wonderful and wacky stuff with our pin IO But that's man. There's just I/O configuration in Fpgas as a 2hour tutorial in its own right. and there's countless other stuff as well in this in both the Altia and the Zyink tools, and the tools from other lesser Uh manufacturers as well.

And yeah, I could do a million videos on these and still not cover them. As you can see, these are very, very complex tools. these Fpga in. you know, pretty much if you're doing it at this sort of level using these vendor tools as they're called, then you know, um, you have to learn how to do these things.

but uh, by loading in these example projects and getting everything up and running, Then it takes, you know, and then working backwards from that. That takes all at least the uh, you know the the Hollow World Grief out of it. cuz Fpj are incredibly difficult and complex just to get you know the Blinky lead going. Really.

But I haven't touched on one of the awesome things comes with this. Deo Nano If you want to create a new project from scratch, how do you do it well with the Uh Dis? here comes some tools. and they've got a control panel allows you to control stuff but there system builder stuff. let's give this a go.

Here it is. look at this ter terasic. don't know how to pronounce their bloody name. it's a bit hard.

But here's the Deo Nano Fpga board and you can e blog. Let's call our project here and what do you want to use I Want to use a clock? I'm going to use a couple of buttons I Want to use SRAM I Want to use everything and what? Oh look. 5 megapixel camera looks like they got some uh modules that you can whack on to the header. That's pretty neat.

4 and a 4.3 in LCD and touch multi-touch LCDs Presumably you can just buy those plug them in anyway. Um, the whole idea is this will generate a code template for you that you can work from and take all that really annoying pin configuration stuff and things like that out of the equation. So here we go. let's try it.

I Haven't tried it yet, but let's generate Gpio header. There we go. Well, you know we've got n let's just go Gpio default shall we? and let's just go generate and it will generate. Ah, here we go.

I'll save it and then we'll try and do something. And here it is code generated EV Blog and Bingo there's our code. Let's check it out. We can load that, just load up the uh, Quartus project file here and we're in like Flynn And here is our project or with our template already set up.

Here's our dam configuration, the leads, key switches, everything is set up ready to go and we can just add our own code on top of that. Beautiful! And then we've got this uh, bit of wanky, uh control panel software that comes with it. but it just allows you to have a basic play. It just uh, talks to the uh board and then just allows you to um, you know, switch the leads off and on and you know, touch the switches and things like that and uh, you know, right stuff to the memory and play with the accelerometer.

There it is we can Muck around and uh, ADC bugger off a vast go away and then you know and then we can just you know, play around with it. But really, you know that's not a huge uh value ad, that's just more of a toy. but that system builder stuff that is a real Bobby dazzler. Let me tell you, that is essential for beginners to build, uh to generate those code templates to get you up and running cuz nothing is worse than your Fpga that just you know that just does nothing as a beginner.

You just you know, try to get and configure all your pins and just get all the assignments and everything working just so the damn thing compiles and that can be a real hurdle whereas that code generator huge step.