The Mojo - $65 FPGA Development Board Powered By Xilinx Spartan 6

Embedded Micro has started a kickstarter campaign to fund an FPGA board called “the Mojo”, “designed to be user friendly and a great introduction into digital design”. The board is powered by a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA that comes with over 9,000 logic cells, and will allow you to design digital circuits composed of a bunch of logic and, or, nor, etc… gates connected together to perform a specific task.

Here are the features of “The Mojo”:

Spartan 6 XC6SLX9 FPGA – 9,152 logic cells for your largest designs
84 general purpose digital IO pins (3.3V logic level)
8 analog inputs
8 user controlled LEDs
A USB connection (new revision) to configure the FPGA and send receive data from your design
On board voltage regulation (4.5V – 12V input, 3.3V and 1.2V outputs)
8 MHz on-board clock (can be multiplied internally by the FPGA)
A reset button to be used in your designs

Justin Rajewski, who is behind the project, uploaded a video of an example project (8×16 RGB display GPS Clock / Audio visualizer) to show what can be done with this board. Once the visualizer starts it last for the remaining 3 minutes of the video so you may want to cut it short.

Since many people may not be familiar with HDL (Hardware Description Languages) used to “program” FPGA, Embedded Micro posted some tutorials to get started with Xilinx ISE. The Mojo development environment will be supported on Windows and Linux. The company already released schematics and PCB layout in PDF format.

There are several pledges available, but the most popular is the $65 pledge for an assembled (and tested) Mojo board, followed by the $75 pledge to add a power supply. Shipping is included for US resident, but you need to add $5 for international shipping.

Via Reddit

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.