9

Crowdfunding now

REGULAR

CROWDFUNDING

NOW

When backing a crowdfunding

campaign, you are not purchasing

a finished product, but supporting

a project working on something

new. There is a very real chance

that the product will never ship

and you’ll lose your money. It’s

a great way to support projects

you like and get some cheap

hardware in the process, but if

you use it purely as a chance to

snag cheap stuff, you may find

that you get burned.

BUYER

BEWARE!

ield-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, are the

popular technology of the moment. They combine

the advantages of programmable hardware and custom-

designed circuits by letting you alter the connections

between logic units to implement an almost limitless

range of functions.

While they’re not a new technology, they’ve historically been

expensive and hard to program. However, things are starting

to change, and the Alchitry project is aiming to make FPGA

development much easier for beginners. It comes from the

people behind the Mojo IDE, which is far simpler to use than

the professional development environments using VHDL or

Verilog. It’s hardly beginner-friendly in the sense that we wouldn’t

recommend it to someone with no technical experience, but if you

can program, you should be able to get to grips with this.

There are two levels of boards available; the gold, which costs

$95 and features an Artix 7 FPGA with 256MB DDR 3 RAM, and

the copper, which is $50, and has the less powerful iCE40 FPGA.

Besides the power, the copper stands out as it can be programmed

with the open-source Project IceStorm tools, while the gold requires

the proprietary Xilinx toolchain. As well as these FPGAs, you can

also get add-on boards with protoboard or input and outputs.

It looks like a great project, but we haven’t yet got our hands on

it to be able to test it properly.

F

Alchitry

Making FPGAs easy to use

From $50 + hsmag.cc/Unhznb Delivery: October 2018

While they’re not a new technology,

they’ve historically been expensive and

hard to program. However, things are

starting to change...

”

”

Above

The Alchitry boards expose large

amounts of GPIO pins (102 on

the gold and 79 on the copper),

via expansion connectors

Below

The IO board adds lights

and buttons to help you

get started