I’d like to announce the latest open source hardware project “myStorm” – its a fusion of a Lattice ICE40HX4K FPGA with a STM32F103RCT7 playing the support role.
The board will take either a genuine STM32F103 or the somewhat more economical GD32103RCT7, priced locally in Shenzhen at $1.92 in 1 off.
The FPGA and STM32 are connected by and 8 bit bus – with handshake lines.
52 of the FPGA signals are broken out to PMOD connectors.
20 of the GPIO and 6 analogue inputs of the STM32 are broken out to Arduino style shield headers.
It is designed to use Clifford Wolf’s Project Ice Storm open source FPGA design and programing tool chain –
You can plug in a Raspberry Pi or Pi Zero directly into the end connector – to host the Ice Storm tools. Both the FPGA and the STM32 can be accessed from the Pi via the 8 bit bidirectional bus.
The boards are now on their way from Shenzhen – and I got a sneak preview this morning from my Shenzhen friend Toby Yu – who is managing the job out there.
It’s early days – but these boards were still being worked on in EagleCAD just last Thursday.
You can read about the project here
https://folknologylabs.wordpress.com/20 … ect-storm/
Alan Wood and I have created this little 75x75mm board for a forthcoming FPGA course.
It’s a no nonsense board for people that want low cost FPGA hardware.
The expected price of this little board is expected to be around US$30
Future versions to work with $9 CHIP, PocketCHIP and recently announced Omega2 – are also at the early planning stage.
Ken Boak, Alan Wood and Toby Yu
( reach us via twitter @monsonite @folknology @TobyYu3 using #myStorm )
Open Sourrce Hardware User’s Group (OSHUG)
London
- Close Up of myStorm pcb
- mystorm_close_top.jpg (81.72 KiB) Viewed 3175 times
We will be building and testing a small batch of boards over the next 10 days (we have 40 waiting in Shenzhen and 10 en-route to London)
If things look good – we will be offering factory built boards to friends and early adopters – for about $30
Ken
If things look good – we will be offering factory built boards to friends and early adopters – for about $30
F103RC is a good choice as it has a load of extra peripherals like SDIO which the F103C (and F103RB) doesn’t have.
The board will take either a genuine STM32F103 or the somewhat more economical GD32103RCT7, priced locally in Shenzhen at $1.92 in 1 off.
It’s been a busy 48 hours…
The first pcb samples of the STM32F103RC and Lattice ICE40 FPGA delivered to me in the UK on Thursday lunchtime – along with the upper and lower laser-cut solder paste stencils.
Alan and I have put together the first sample – with another two to be populated and “baked” on Sunday morning. This has been a real “kitchen table-top” operation – literally
Read all about it in Alan’s Blog, here
https://folknologylabs.wordpress.com/20 … p-a-storm/
Or engage in this over at Hacker News – search term “myStorm”
More updates later – after we have a bit more STM32 support code written
Ken
We got 3 prototypes built up in late July for firmware development purposes, and then proceeded with a pilot production batch of 48 boards.
These just came off the production line in Shenzhen yesterday lunchtime (UK time)
We are running a workshop at the Open Source Hardware Camp (OSHCamp2016) next weekend – and sending some boards out into the community for people to have a play.
The first boards have a STM32F103RET6 on board. We use the open source Project ICEStorm toolchain to load the flash of the ‘103 with the bitfile for the FPGA – and the ‘103 then uses SPI to squirt this into the FPGA.
In the Fall (late October/November) we hope to do a production batch of 1000+ boards. These will be priced between $30 and $49 depending on build options – choice of mcu, size of fast SRAM etc.
myStorm has been an experiment in lean,mean Open Engineering. From concept to delivery in 100 days.
We’ve spent about US$2000 so far to get us to the point of 50 pilot producton boards. Design and firmware currently with a team of 3 in the UK, production and components sourcing is a friend in Shenzhen.
You can follow the project here https://folknologylabs.wordpress.com/20 … ect-storm/
We have a new website and mailing list that should be going live around 2nd September. https://mystorm.uk/ Still full of typos – so please bear with us.
regards
ken
I spent this fall messing with Xilinx’es XC6SLX9 in 144pin flatpack, and it has been a great fun. I did with microblaze, pdp-8.
The only issue I see is the fpga there in myStorm is rather small – the SLX9 is _much_ bigger one, and after a few months of playing with it it becomes rather small too
Just to clarify possible misunderstanding about myStorm – the open source FPGA board.
The first 25 boards were fitted with STM32F103RCT6 – chosen for it’s 256K of flash within which we could hold the 130K+ of bitstream file for programming the FPGA. These boards were freely distributed to attendees at a FPGA programming workshop in September 2016.
An additional 25 boards from the same batch were fitted with STM32L476 devices – we wanted to move up to a low power M4 core – and there was some speculation about putting microPython capabilities on the board.
The STM32L476 was a bit expensive – so the next batch of 445 boards were built with the cheaper STM32L433 – pcbs of this build are known as BlackIce
All boards have a 256Kx16 10nS SRAM closely coupled to the FPGA and a microSD socket. 56 of the FPGA GPIO lines are brought out to external connectors.
One of our forum members, Richard Miller has created a board package – so that the STM32L433 may be programmed from the Arduino IDE. This has been built on the top of the STM32L4xx work by “GrumpyOldPizza”
https://forum.mystorm.uk/t/arduino-boar … kice/279/1
In addition to being Arduino compatible – there is great interest in using the BlackIce board for retrocomputing and modeling new soft core processor designs.
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We have designs including Acorn Atom (6502), BBC Model B (6502), Jupiter Ace (forth Z80) and a generic Z80 CP/M machine.
In terms of soft cores we have James Bowman’s J1 Forth Processor and also a 16bit register based machine – the OPC6 that runs at about 40MHz.
https://github.com/revaldinho/opc
We are actively continuing with myStorm developments – combining STM32xxxx microcontrollers with Lattice ICE40 parts. They are certainly not the biggest or fastest FPGAs, but they can be developed using open source tools and are economically priced for the student or hobbyist.
Ken
I think its a very interesting board, and I will order one at some point…
