Alorium XLR8 Arduino Compatible Altera MAX 10 FPGA Board Sells for $75

We already have a fair choice of boards with Arduino compatible headers powered by an FPGA with options such as $99 Digilent Arty (Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA), FleaFPGA (Lattice FPGA), Papillio DUO (Xilinx Spartan 6), or Snickerdoodle + shieldBuddy (Xilinx Zynq-7010/20). There’s no yet another choice with Alorium Technology XLR8 Arduino UNO like board powered by Altera MAX10 FPGA.

XLR8 board specifications:

FPGA – Altera MAX 10 FPGA
MCU – Atmel/Microchip ATmega328 8-bit MCU
Digital I/Os
- 5V inputs, 3.3V outputs
- 14x Digital I/O Pins
- 6x PWM Digital I/O Pins
- 6x Analog Pins
Analog Inputs
- 5V tolerant
- Op-amp circuit emulates 0-5V behavior of the ADCs on the Arduino UNO
- Performance: 1 MHz;
- Resolution: 12-bit sustained
- Sample Rate: 154k samples/second
Power Supply – 5V via USB or barrel connector
Dimensions – Arduino UNO form factor

The board is supported by Altera Quartus Prime Lite Edition, and programmable either via JTAG though a USB blaster, or USB with OpenXLR8 and Arduino IDE without additional hardware as shown in the diagram below.

The FPGA can be programmed with what the company called Xcelerator Blocks (XB), an optimized hardware implementation of a specific processor intensive function, with functions such as Floating-point math, servo control, or NeoPixel shields, strips, and arrays control currently available. Future implementations likely to be worked on include: Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control, event counters and timers, quadrature encoders/decoders, PWM, multiple UARTs, and enhanced Analog-to-Digital (ADC) functionality.

Alorium XLR8 board can be purchased on Mouser for $75. More details, including a wiki, a user forum, videos, and various getting started resources are available on Alorium Technology website.

Thanks to Nanik for the tip

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.