7

LENS

Bringing together a

microcontroller with an

FPGA in an established

(well, establishing) form

factor opens up a lot

of potential. The FPGA

enables you to do things in

orders of magnitude faster

than the microcontroller,

but FPGA programming is

a very different prospect

to microcontroller

programming, and

currently there are

few hobbyists working

with FPGAs.

The development

environment Arduino

is creating will make it

much easier for people to

configure their Vidor 4000,

but only with pre-created

blocks of IP. The success

or failure of this board

depends entirely on what

IP is created for it. If

hobbyists with the skills

(or corporations with the

money) to develop useful

IP get behind this, then

it can open up a whole

new chapter in maker

electronics.

Getting a critical mass

of IP for the Vidor is a

challenging prospect,

but 15 years ago people

might have said the same

thing about creating

a microcontroller

environment that works

for artists and designers.

If anyone can do this, a

newly invigorated Arduino

can. We wish them luck

because this could be a

fantastic new ecosystem.

THE

HACKSPACE

VIEW

HackSpace This environment for dragging and
dropping IP around – will it work on a wide range
of FPGAs?

FV At the beginning it will only work on the Vidor
family of boards because there is an underlying
compilation process that is required – which we
will do in the cloud – using a proprietary toolchain
from Intel Altera (the provider of the FPGA that we
use – the Intel Cyclone 10 in this case). Initially this
environment will be tailored to the environment we
use, but in the future it can be expanded.

At release, we will have a simplified version.

A predefined set of IPs will be made available at

the commercial launch in the second half of June

where people can just include an Arduino library,

and the IDE will run all the tasks that are needed

to load the image for the FPGA, and we provide

the library to use the intellectual property with the

Arduino, so it’s extremely simple.

People don’t even have to know any details

about the FPGA. They just say “I want four USB

ports” and they just include the USB IP and then

they can use it very simply.

SHARING FPGA CODE

1

Cyclone 10 FPGA which includes 16 K Logic

Elements, 504kbit of embedded RAM and 56

18 × 18-bit HW multipliers. Each pin can toggle

at over 150MHz and can be configured for

functions such as UARTs, (Q)SPI, high-res/

high-freq PWM, quadrature encoder, I^2 C, I^2 S,

Sigma Delta DAC, etc.

2 U-blox module for WiFi/Bluetooth Low Energy

3

SAMD21 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller that can

be used in the same way as traditional Arduinos

4 Mini PCI Express port with programmable pins

5 MIPI camera connector

6 MKR form factor headers. Each pin can be

controlled by both the microcontroller and the

FPGA. With the latter, each can be configured

with functions such as UART, SPI,

high-resolution PWM, or any many other

hardware protocols as the pins can toggle at

over 150MHz

7 LiPo battery connector

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4

5

6

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