FEATURE
Arduino: The Next Generation
HackSpace What sort of applications do you have in
mind for the FPGA?FV Basically, this is FPGA tech in a small form factor
and this can be used for some video applications (but
it isn’t a powerful video adapter like the Raspberry Pi
has). The idea is for people who are familiar with the
Arduino language, but want more capabilities in terms
of signal processing or creating a different set of digital
inputs and outputs ... take tools for doing precise motor
control: this requires a kind of real-time requirement
and high parallelism, which is the kind of thing we have
in mind. In 3D printing, this kind of solution could be
very important because it can very simply increase the
precision of motor control by orders of magnitude.
The nice thing about this is that you don’t have to
know FPGA technology in order to use it. The idea is to
release a development environment to allow the users to
just drag and drop the predefined blocks of intellectual
property – a sort of environment like Blockly – and they
can create their own peripherals this way.HackSpace Will people be able to write their own IP
to add functionality to the FPGAs?FV If they know how to do that and if they know the
Intel toolchain, they can program whatever they
want with the FPGA. It’s quite a complicated kind of
technology, but if they know how to, for sure.
We think that – especially in universities – this
is also a way we can increase the quantity of IP
that is available for the board. We are committed
to developing a number of intellectual properties,
but of course we are looking for the creativity of the
community as far as open-source IP is concerned.THE POWER OF FPGA
Design your own hardware
MKR
VIDOR 4000
p until now, Arduino has focused
on creating microcontroller boards.
On these, you upload a program into
the board’s storage and the on-
board processor runs this code. The
MKR Vidor 4000 is Arduino’s first
foray into a whole new class of technology – field-
programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs contain
a large number of logical bits of hardware that can
perform logical actions, and you can connect them
together in different ways.
A specification for how to connect the different
logical elements is known as a bitstream, and it
contains intellectual property (IP). This IP could, for
example, contain a specification for a USB port, or a
circuit to manipulate an image in a particular way.
The main difference from a user’s point of view
is that, while a microcontroller and an FPGA can
both be programmed to perform a specific action,
the microcontroller does it by stepping through a
program one line at a time, while the FPGA does it
in a circuit that typically can do a large number of
calculations at the same time. In many cases, the
FPGA processes data much, much faster than a
microcontroller can.
The downside of this, in general, is that
historically, FPGAs have been a great deal harder to
program than microcontrollers. However, of course,
Arduino has a plan...U