
First Draft: Saturn Project Logo
I’ve always been amazed at the power and most importantly the flexibility of an FPGA (Field-Programmable gate array). I first learned about the FPGA after spending uncountable hours connecting jumper wires between several 74xx series IC’s in my undergrad digital logic course.
One giant pile of reconfigurable logic. Brilliant! Goodbye hours of tedious, mind-numbing wire jumpers and handfuls of discrete IC’s. Hello satisfyingly fast, rapid development!
My first thought was how do I get my hands on one of these FPGA widgets? It turns out that the easiest way is to shell out anywhere from $100 to $10,000 (I kid you not) for an evaluation/development board.
These development kits are great for getting you up and running: Plug in the power, the USB programming cable and type out some Verilog code and you have a sweet blinky light! However, the main problem with the development board is that it encapsulates all the details of the FPGA behind the curtain. These dev boards leave a large gap between learning the basics, and actually developing a standalone project.
Enter the Saturn Project.
A few months back I came across an excellent breakout board for the Altera Cyclone II FPGA over at SparkFun. Coming in at just $79.95, this will be a great starting point to prototype standalone FPGA projects. Down the line when you want to buy the FPGA by itself, it will cost you about $20 and comes in a QFP package, which means it’s hand solderable!
The goal of the Saturn Project is to create a core FPGA architecture that will allow me to quickly develop derivative projects. The focus of the Project is to get an FPGA workhorse, with all the proper voltage regulators, clocks and a USB interface to my PC, with fast data transfer rates. Some additional possibilities include on-board FPGA configuration, wireless connectivity and ARM/PIC interoperability. (Don’t want to have a separate ARM/PIC IC? You can drop a RISC soft-processor into the FPGA!)
Once this main project is completed, I can move onto some of my more ambitions ideas.
It has taken me awhile to get all this going, but now the Adventure begins…
- Real Time Video and Image capture and processing.
- Playing around with Analog-to-Digital Converters… hopefully culminating in a waveform capture tool (Read: cheap mixed signal oscilloscope).
- LED/LCD Drivers.
- Wireless Mote Data Logging
[…] DE0-Nano development board from Terasic. This little guy is exactly what I was aiming for with my Saturn Project. Looking at everything they pack in here for $79, I don’t think there was anyway I could have […]
[…] (using the second PLL) will give me the USB standard 48MHz clock I need. Once I create a PCB for my Saturn Project, which should be much more immune to noise, I will probably use a 48MHz clock in order to free up […]
[…] I decided to interrupt my Cyclone II Handbook dissection series in order to build the voltage regulators needed for the Saturn Project. […]
Hi Ril3y,
Thanks for dropping by!
I have yet to come across any good hobby sites that talk about how to use an FPGA, I’m hoping I can fill that niche.
It would be amazing if I could turn the Saturn into the arduino of FPGA’s 🙂
Overall, I just want to have fun and make some cool projects, and share my results with the community at the same time.
–Chris
So is this a framework sort of? Perhaps the arduino of FPGA’s 🙂
Ril3y
[…] Here is a breakdown of the different flavors we have. (I highlighted the particular CII that comes with our breakout board) […]