Guest Video: OpenTechLab - IcoBoard FPGA Experiments
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- Опубліковано 23 сер 2024
- In this guest video, Joel from OpenTechLab reviews and experiments with the IcoBoard, which features the Lattice iCE40 FPGA, and firmware synthesis with the Open Source "IceStorm" tool-chain.
icoBOARD is a FPGA based IO board for the RaspberryPi
Part 2 is on his channel: • [013-2] Open Source FP...
Show Notes: opentechlab.or...
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This 1st vacation proxy video is definitely a winner! Thank you Joel and thank you Dave for choosing Joel
It's really nice of you to give other channels a chance by giving them a forum. Respect!
Never heard about Open Source FPGA development.. We are indeed living in a wonderful time!! Subscribed!!!!!
I'm not particularly into FPGAs, but I love the fact that you took a pretty simple FPGA hat for the blinky and didn't use something overly complicated (for beginners) like the DE0-Nano - Altera Cyclone IV FPGA
well I didn't mean the FPGA chip but rather the board ;)
@OpenTechLab thank you for your great and important work!
Exactly the chanel i searching for!
Happy that OpenTechLab got this spot! Such great content deserves a bigger audience.
His body moves but his head stays still... I like him !
No - silly. My body stays still. I just move my head, the camera and the room with my mind.
Pigeons do this too. Anyhow, I love this guy's content and happily subbed to his channel
Should have gone the loo before starting ..
I was creepin the comments for someone talking about this
The guest videos are a very nice idea. Thanks Dave and Joel!
edit after watching the whole video: Thanks aswell for remotivating me to get into FPGA and especially VHDL coding again! :)
Dave made a good choice, and you've made a great video. It fits this channel very well.
Subscribed, great video!
Hey Kerry - I love your videos!
Thanks!
Great video , now peaple can atleast stop bugging about projrcts to dave , plus i never saw a fpga project , thanks for making video super easy to undestand (counter)
Great video, 15years ago i was playing with a vertex fpga, from vhdl output blowing in the chip!
great video. you got a new subscriber. Probably gonna bingewatch a dozen videos from your channel now.
Great video as always Joel!
Finally this channel gets the exposure it deserves :)
Im not an electronics guy, but i just wanted to say that introduction was great, clear, concise and short.
Glad to see you made it on buddy, love your stuff!
Great overview. Would love to see a full course on FPGA using only FOSS tools. Super cool, thank you Joel !
We from the FOSS world love EEVBlog even more for sharing your popular platform to shred some FOSS light on others.
This is really cool, Dave. We viewers discover all new sources of interesting content thanks to the guest videos. And the channels for which you provide the stage of your channel get tons of new subscribers and hopefully this will get them to create even more awesome content.
Congratulations Dave and Joel, a home run on the first guest video. FPGAs and Open Source, including RISK-V, is more that I would have thought to ask for.
This is almoast like the EEV blog channel has been open sourced. Really nice to promote other channels like this!
You made FPGAs very accessible. Jumping over to pt2 very eagerly!
Great video Joel, I've wanted to get into FPGAs for a bit but so far been baulked by the the complication and expense... subbed to your channel :)
Thanks Dave for choosing Joel
Great presentation Joe, now about to subscribe. Great work, thanks!
Wow, that’s some real quality content right there, thank you! Always wanted a beginner FPGA intro and this is perfect. Now I’ll have to get one of those boards..and a newer raspberry pi.
This is a wonderful idea for a side series. EEVblog is definitely the goto for EE & Electronics!
First decent video in years. Subbed.
Awesome that we are getting to see new faces.
My favourite new channel as a guest at my favourite old channel
Very nice presentation Joel, Thanks Dave for giving others a chance.
Yeah - thanks Dave! And thanks for watching!
great video! What was fun to me to notice is, that the base board is seemingly done by a company only about half an hour drive from my home. What are the odds!
Timely topic, especially relevant for me, as I've been getting VERY tired of using the Xilinx tools with my Spartan6 boards.
Excellent organization, structure and narrative. Ideal content, in both scope and functionality.
My only content wish would be for a quick trip through a simulation pass for this very simple design, since it is not revisited in the second video.
The only tiny production nit I can pick would be to make the audio leveling more uniform.
Great job!
Open source FPGA, OMG! This is the best thing ever.
Great video as usual. Cool to see an FPGA device with open source tools.
I only found your channel about a month ago,,, your stuff on sigrok is awesome and now the ice40, well done. Welcome to the bigtime :-)
How small the world is - when I heard "Clifford Wolf" I recognized the name. And sure: Clifford Wolf the FPGA Guru, is also the OpenSCAD developer Clifford Wolf.
Hey Joel. Great Video. Thankyou :) - Subscribed
I LIKE IT - flashy bling (edge) too! Nice review.
Strewth, Dave's been taking elocution Lessons!
Finally, I can understand him.
:)
If you can't understand Dave, you must live in the wrong country, ya nong
Yayyyyy, FPGA voodoo magic!!
Absoluetly superb video! Thanks, Joel!
Outstanding! Thanks.
Great job Joel! - Really interesting video, these FPGA's are so cool!
I have NFI what most of that was, but I was still so intrigued!
I was loking for a good FPGA intro. Thanks. Subbed !
this is easily your best content in the past few weeks. If at any point my sub list grows to high..he will take your spot lol jk. (but you did get him a sub) Thanks
Ass allways Daves share with us excellent content. Sucribed, excelent video, I see the second part and waiting for more.
Joel is awesome, subscribed!
Joel - great video, subbed.
Great production quality. Subbed.
Awesomeness! Always thought FPGAs were a little over my head really.... but maybe not? Will sub & look - Thanks Joel :)
Subscribed, excelet work man!
Woohoo! I already watched this on the OTL channel
"Guest Video" i like the concept thanks you 👍👍
Interesting video, thanks for making it.
Dave - great idea, great choice. Subscribed.
Impressive - I've been looking at these things for a few months and figured they were too involved to mess with. But this makes it look a little more manageable. My first thought is how it visually looks like it could handle a neural net. To what end I don't really know, but I think it's worth investigating further. Any suggestions on a good verilog book? Thanks for the excellent introduction.
Very nice video! Finally some serious FPGA stuff on the channel. ^^
Does this open source toolchain also support VHDL?
I heard some rumors about VHDL support in the works for Yosys. Also, people have used vhdl2verilog as a front-end - I heard it works ok.
Subscribed. Also, couldn't you just update whatever version of Raspbian the icoBoard crew provides on their website?
Cool! Keep it up!
First thing I thought of seeing this board was the 1Hz to 10hz sound detection FPAG design from an Evolution Algorithm in 2006.
Fantastic video, subbed!
Great video. Thanks
I like the new Dave, seems fun :) Let's have him on once a week =)
Gunnar Freyr I can't make videos that quick. Family/work commitments- you know how it is ;-)
Hey Joel, greetings from the Richmond Maker Labs :)
Hey!! Thanks for watching. I miss you guys
Didn't know you had a channel, just subscribed ! :) I'm based in USA those days, so only visit London occasionally - but RML is doing well from what I see :)
Better than most of Dave's videos tbh. Boy, does Dave ramble...
Jefferson Allan Well, daves channel is a "blog" (maybe) and not education. I watch it for fun and not for learning specific things. The things you learn are usually just random stuff related to maybe a teardown.
yeah and Dave is a bit "outdated" when it comes to things like microcontrollers and programming
8:19 It's funny, I didn't notice them until you told me. And is there an open source toolchain for the Altera and Xilinx FPGAs as well? Right now I have a cheap Cyclone II board + USB Blaster clone. I've also seen some cheap Cyclone IV and Spartan-3E boards. I say this because for big projects with lots of logic elements, like video encoders and probably cryptocurrency miners, this chip is a bit small. It's, however, very good to get started and there are lots of projects you can do with this FPGA. And I subbed to your channel!
Very nice. But it feels like it's all been done in 1 breath. Subscribed :)
Dave should go on vacation more often!!!
Been on embedded design for over a decade now. Feels like this video would make me try out FPGAs. The support for open development was piss poor a decade back. Gotta start off now, nothing better than being able to make your own glue logic for embedded systems!
Pratik Panda I wonder if the open tools support the glue logic-sized simpler devices (CPLDs with normal logic levels in QFP packages rather than high density FPGAs with sub-2V levels in BGA packages). Those seem to be almost abandoned by the factories these days. I've been looking at chips like Intel (Altera) Max5 and Lattice Mach 4000 for a recent project, and even those require an external 1.8V precision LDO and external TTL level converters.
Really glad Joel's channel got some exposer. Check out his great videos on logic analysers.
I think those huge install sizes come from the windows culture. on linux, file sizes are usually much more reasonable, only a few megs being all that's really needed to contain the entire executable and a few text config files, even the "installer" itself if it's an installable package. actually, more common are executables of only a few kilobytes. the smaller file sizes will also run a bit faster too.
maybe it's just a historic remnant from the time when everything came on cd's, and they would fill it with all kinds of crap just because they could. hard drives also became bigger as time went on, meaning they could worry about space usage less and less. meanwhile you get linux and all its programs from the internet, where size matters much more. a smaller download size means much less bandwidth used to host those files, and the hosting is often sponsored, so even more important to keep sizes small. as well as people from around the world freely working at optimizations if they so choose. a corporation on the other hand, costs them much money to do such optimizations. short term it saves them money, but there are penalties at the user end.
I agree 100%. I've heard the mantra "bytes are cheap, engineers are expensive" many times, which makes buisiness sense, but for engineering it's crippling, because there's no way Vivado could ever run on a raspberry-pi. Do you want to be able to do that? Who knows, but it doesn't matter, because you can't. So on Linux it's easier to innovate, because you don't run into people telling you that you can't do something, because they don't think you need to be able to.
open source hardware, wooooooooo!
Very cool, subscribed!
Well explained and using only OpenSource, i can't ask for more. Obviously subscribed.
For those on Gentoo : gpo.zugaina.org/dev-embedded/icestorm
You can always ask for more... What about xilinx 7 series and open source? ;-)
Watch this ua-cam.com/video/Y1Wwa8csFjk/v-deo.html ;-)
Thanks for the heads-up, zvpunry. Always great to see more free software and open hardware.
Kudos also to Dave Jones for his pointer to Joel’s OpenTechLab!
Now i hate myself for not going to ccc this year :(
at least us pommies can get on an aussie youtube channel, even if we can't win a cricket match. Small victories!
even a blind chicken finds a seed once in a while
If you are interested with FPGA's have a look at the Jerri Ellsworth channel and her FPGA SDR Radio series, you will need a VDHL++ compiler, If you are going with a Raspberry Pi why not go with the Pi-Drive which should be able to store the Jessie OS for ARM and your applications.
Awesome, i always wanted to do something with an FPGA but all the time, i was concerned about the toolchain and also the philosopy of the companies, giving the hardware FPGA boards away for a "few" bucks, but wanted to get some sort of "return on investment" when you want to do soemething, you either do it on your own, or buy some software modules which will to it on the FPGA for you but they don´t come cheap anymore...
I've never worked with Opensource toolchains on FPGAs before. If I we're to pick this FPGA showed in the video for my next project, is there a public collection of IP cores out there? I've worked with Xilinx Vivado and ISE before and really liked the IP catalog they have (although they are obviously not freely licensed). If I want a dual clock FIFO on the Lattice, am I going to need to program that myself or are these kind of things already out there (with free license)?
Historically there's a lot of stuff on OpenCores - but there are issues with the way it is managed. So LibreCores is getting started to fill the gap. Also you might want to check out fusesoc - which is a package manager for FPGAs, and includes many cores in the standard index.
I like it, subscribed already.
Am I the only one who was completely lost for the last 21 minutes of this?
Seems as an interesting channel. Subscribed.
This video was edited in open shot? if so nice one, I love linux ubuntu is your friend. You should do a video on how you edit your videos
kdenlive! with a bit of help from ffmpeg via some scripts
Great idea of Daves ive subed
There's also www.myhdl.org/ which can be used to render to vhdl / verilog from python
> vim user
Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well.
I've subscribed mainly because I don't understand FPGAs so hoping to learn something, well anything is possible
Hmmmm for the last 3 blocks I think it implemented it like flip-flops connected as slaves to the register as master in order to get the multiplied clock signal from the output
Awesome video!
If you need any proof of that, As of my comment about 1 in 6 people who saw this video went and subscribed to your channel, that's an insane conversion rate! (going by socialblade you got 1k subs today, and video has 6k views)
Subbed!
Yeah I'm pretty blown away by it. The sub-count was 4,727 the minute before the video released. Dave's done me a massive favor giving me a platform. I'm looking forward to seeing the other submissions.
That's awesome! I don't even know you and I'm delighted for you!
It took me just under a year to get 1k and I was so happy when I got it! I can only imaging how you feel after getting 1.5k in 4 hours!
Nice FPGA Videos :D
Wow, I wonder how the compiler branches from a sort of a cpu module inside an FPGA instead of some sort of digital logic. Also can you short out an FPGA by accident and destroy it?
You will reap what you sow
I kinda want to learn FPGA-fu and try making a simple Engine ECU out of it.
What video editing software are you using on Linux? Still looking for a decent one.
kdenlive, and a bit of ffmpeg on the command line with scripts
Thanks, I'll check it out. Appreciate your answer.
I'm a bit surprised that verilog compiled, selecting bits in a vector should normally be done in the same order as the vector was defined, and afair regardless of how you define it the left most bit is always msb
90mins waiting for it to compile then writing code just to flash some LEDs. Is there a precompiled version? You assume everyone already knows linux commands and what code to write and how. I wouldn't know where to start.
The code here is relatively new, so up until recently the IceStorm tools havn't been available via the package repositories on various Linux distributions - which is the normal "app-store" method of installing things on Linux. Though this is changing. The commands to build from source are pretty much in keeping with other software on Linux - if you want to do it yourself, check out the instructions on the IceStorm website. Also there is a pre-built RPi image on the IcoBoard website with the tools pre-built and installed if you want to do synthesis on there - which is much quicker to set up, but not so good for understanding what has been installed and how.
Install APIO, it’s a cross-platform Python tool that sets up the tool chain for most of the iCE40 FPGA boards. It will download pre-compiled binaries for your platform: github.com/FPGAwars/apio/blob/develop/README.md
awesome
Fun video...
What do you use for video editing? You said its all open source and ive been looking for something like that for a long time,
kdenlive on Ubuntu. You may find problems with it, but it has progressed immeasurably in the past year - I don't have many complaints about it these days. There's also PiTiVi and OpenShot, but they're not quite so far along IMHO, but they're also growing. I also use ffmpeg on the command line and some scripts to pre-process my clips.
Awesome, thanks!
There really wasn't an open source toolkit for FPGAs until a couple years ago? WTF did people do with them for the last 20 years? I've been doing software since these came out and pretty much lost track of them, kind of assuming that there was some development going on, but that it hadn't impacted me meant that it wasn't really ready for prime time. If FPGA takeup wasn't due to its fundamental limitations but due to library availability, wow, someone really dropped the ball on this.
FPGAs are mostly needed in professional development with high-speed stuff, so there wasn't really a market for hobbyists. People who get paid for this full time don't really mind using closed software that costs in the four-digit range usually.
Affordable FPGAs for hobbyist experimentation only became a thing a few years ago. Still, the real applications in the hobbyist space that couldn't be done by a reasonable microcontroller as well are far inbetween.
It's not only the price, FPGAs are harder to use (hard to debug as can be seen in part 2 of this video, and compiling can take hours on larger projects). ARM only really took off in the hobby scene with the Raspberry Pi, where you could work on the target platform directly, making the whole development cycle seem much faster (even if in reality it was offset by the increased compile times on the Raspberry Pi).
I don't recommend doing synthesis on the RPi for obvious reasons. IceStorm is pretty quick though - the SoC demo took my 10-year old Intel Core2 Quad about 4 minutes to synthesize. It's hard to tell what the performance will be like for larger FPGAs when they are supported, but I'm optimistic, because OSS projects tend to be nail those kinds of things.
Yeah, I'll stay with Altera/Intel and Xilinx FPGAs.