
FPGA-Based Arduino in the “MKR” form factor - vongomben
https://blog.arduino.cc/2018/05/17/say-hello-to-the-next-generation-of-arduino-boards/
======
jburgess777
This appear to use a Cyclone FPGA from Intel, which was previously Altera:
[https://www.altera.com/](https://www.altera.com/)

It will be interesting to see how this compares to some of the existing
designs based around the Lattice ICE40. The Lattice FPGA programming
information was reverse engineered and this triggered a lot of interest around
the open source toolchain and many boards were designed around this FPGA:

[http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/](http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/)

[https://www.tindie.com/products/Folknology/blackice-
ii/](https://www.tindie.com/products/Folknology/blackice-ii/)

[http://icoboard.org/](http://icoboard.org/)

[https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/iCE40/iCE40HX1K-EVB/](https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/iCE40/iCE40HX1K-EVB/)

[https://blackmesalabs.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/icezero-
fpga-...](https://blackmesalabs.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/icezero-fpga-board-
for-rasppi/)

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/qwerty-embedded-
design/beaglewir...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/qwerty-embedded-
design/beaglewire)

~~~
fermienrico
The article mentions every other chip but fails to mention Intel name. It just
skips with "based on an FPGA chip". Why?

They call out every other chip with excruciating detail. This bothers me.

------
BenoitP
This seems to be begging for an FPGA Tensorflow back-end. To my knowledge,
quality speech-to-text is quite compute intensive; and can't run with
reasonable latency on a Raspberry Pi Zero, for example.

Coupled with a chat-bot you could have a smart anything.

"Laundry machine, start the last program"

"Dang, Sarah, what did you do in these clothes? Smells really weird. Starting
nuclear bio-hazard cleansing."

"Steeeeve, imma kill you! Why you always have to switch it to the smart-ass
mode?"

Yikes

------
blacksmith_tb
It's an interesting board for sure - it also has HDMI and PCIe... something
for everyone! I wonder if they are planning to let you program the FPGA from
the Arduino IDE, that's sort of hard to imagine.

~~~
gh02t
Sounds like they are planning on having an app store with pre-built cores that
you can load into the FPGA depending on what functionality you want. It's a
pretty good model and Arduino isn't the first to try it, hopefully it works
well. My guess is that normal users will mostly stick to configurable pre-
built cores and knowledgeable users will probably use more heavy duty tools if
they wanna build their own.

The hardware they've announced is absolutely loaded with features with an ARM
uC, a dual core ESP32, a crypto accelerator and the Altera/Intel FPGA;
hopefully they can keep the price reasonable. I wonder if they cut a deal with
Intel to help subsidize the cost, since Intel just announced their new Xeon
chips with FPGAs. I expect I'll buy one as long as it's under about $75. Only
problem I can really see is that it doesn't have that many pins exposed, but
that's not a huge issue.

[https://hackaday.com/2018/05/18/arduino-just-introduced-
an-f...](https://hackaday.com/2018/05/18/arduino-just-introduced-an-fpga-
board-announces-debugging-and-better-software/)

~~~
dmitrygr

       "App store"
    

I guess everyone gets greedy eventually.

~~~
gh02t
It's just my choice of words, I don't think they are calling it that. I doubt
they're gonna focus on monetizing it any more than the library manager they
already have (which is to say, not at all). You can probably buy commercial IP
cores for the FPGA they are using, but I seriously doubt they will be
distributing those through Arduino. I fully expect that it'll be open source
modules developed for functionality appealing to makers, the Arduino people
have a history of being good citizens (excepting the weird copyright
controversy, but that's not the same thing). Stuff like e.g. RGB LED matrix
drivers, audio DSP or computer vision that fit hobbyist projects, but which
microcontrollers struggle with.

------
kbumsik
Looks very cool, I am wondering the toolchain used with this. Arduino IDE
seems not to be enough. And the price...

