ield Programmable Gate Arrays have
been around for a while, but it’s only in
the last couple of years that they’ve
become accessible to makers. The
technology is a bit complex to get your
head around if you’re used to regular programmable
electronics, like microcontrollers or computers. But in
essence, they’re a bit like those old electronics sets
where you got a lot of electrical components on a
board and could arrange the wires to make different
projects. You could think of the locations of the wires
a bit like a program that you upload by placing wires.
FPGAs do a similar thing, but on a much, much larger
scale. They contain logic units that you can upload a
program to that dictates how they’re all connected.
This flexible nature means that you can do a lot of
different things with them, such as trying out
different CPU cores (e.g. the open-source RISC-V).
FPGAs are also well-suited to processing large
amounts of data, because everything doesn’t have to
go via one single CPU. You can connect
the logic units in such a waythat they manipulate the data in the right way, rather
than building a processing core that runs a program.
That’s FPGAs but what makes the Orange Crab, in
particular, special? Well, it’s in the Feather form factor
which means there’s loads of add-on hardware
already available; it comes with a whopping 128Mb of
DDR 3 memory, 128Mb QSPI flash, and variants
supporting the Lattice ECP5 25, 45, and 85. To help
you get started, there’s a repository of example code
at hsmag.cc/mvQWwW.
For fans of all things open, the Orange Crab is
open-source hardware, and is programmable with an
open-source toolchain.
At the time of going to press, the final price was
yet to be decided, but looked likely to be around $99.
If you’re looking to get into FPGA development, this
could be an excellent choice.F
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!Left
The Feather form
factor is compact,
but still leaves
enough room to
squash in quite a
lot of features