Lattice ECP5 FPGA powered OrangeCrab is the work of Greg Davill who designed the Adafruit Feather-compatible board in KiCAD, crowdsourced schematics/PCB checking and published his progress on Twitter, and published the files of the open source hardware board on Github.
OrangeCrab board hardware specifications:
- FPGA – Lattice ECP5 25/45/85 variants
- System Memory – Up to 8Gbit DDR3 Memory (x16)
- Storage – 128Mbit QSPI FLASH Memory (Bitstream + User storage), 4-bit MicroSD socket
- USB – Micro USB connector, full-speed direct USB connection to FPGA
- Programming – 10-pin FPGA programming header
- Expansion – I/O’s broken out via 30 through holes: GPIO, SPI, I2C, Analog, … 7x diff pairs, 1x single ended only
- Misc – Reset Button, charge LED (Green: external power, Yellow: when charging, No color: when running off battery), 48MHz Oscillator
- Power Supply – 5V via USB port, battery header for LiPo battery + battery charger chip
- Dimensions – Adafruit Feather form factor
There aren’t any sample FPGA bitstream on Github yet, but Hackster.io reports Lattice ECP5 FPGA is supported by Project Trellis open source toolchain, and the FPGA is capable of running a RISC-V softcore.
The project is “still in development “, and it’s unclear if/when it will be available, but all KiCAD design files are there if you feel you’d like join the fun.
Via Electronics Lab
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.
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