Subject:
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Re: Yet another board
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.handyboard
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Date:
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Fri, 23 Jul 1999 21:22:08 GMT
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Original-From:
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Thomas Heidel <THEIDEL@stopspammersADVIS.DE>
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Viewed:
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965 times
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Chuck,
nice dream! I would be in too.
But why not design a kind of a extension board which would
replace the curend extension board? It would save some money i guess.
Thomas.
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I've had something of a vision, and I don't think it was spoiled food :-)
> And I'd like some feedback on it. Bear with me, it requires a bit of set up.
>
> After working with Handyboards, Miniboards, 6.270 Boards, BOTBoards and
> other 68HC11 boards I find I enjoy their easy programability but always
> seem to need some outside circuit to deal with a particular sensor, or other.
>
> Recently, on the advice of a friend, I purchased the "Xilinx Student
> Edition V1.5" from Amazon.com ($90, anyone is a "student"):
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0136716296/ref=ed_oe_p/002-5447280-30
> 80618
> What this book is, is a students guide to learning about FPGAs (Field
> Programmable Gate Arrays), using Xilinx software. It includes all of the
> software necessary to design ten thousand gate equivalent FPGAs (XC4010XL
> parts). The final chapter/example in the book is building an 8 bit
> microprocessor in a single 5000 gate gate array!
>
> If you buy the book you get a coupon that lets you buy the XESS demoboard
> with an XC4005 chip (used for all the tutorials in the book) for $109. So
> for an investment of $200, you end up with everything you need to not only
> learn how to design FPGAs, but to implement them as well. Not a bad deal at
> all.
>
> The XESS demoboard manual is shown here:
> http://www.xess.com/FPGA/manual.html
>
> This board has an 8031 on it, 32K of SRAM, the Xilinx part, a parallel
> port, VGA type connector, 7 segment LED, and wall-wart to 5V&3V power
> supply. Its something like 2" by 4" in size. Both edges of the boards are
> rows of pins the are connected to the FPGA so you can plug the whole board
> into a solderless breadboard and use it that way, or strips of wire wrap
> headers.
>
> The Xilinx part is RAM based, meaning that you download your circuit design
> into it at powerup, or it can automatically read it from a serial EEPROM,
> and then you start using it. All in all it is a very cool board, if only it
> had a 68HC11 instead of an 8031 ...
>
> Flash back to my discussion with my FPGA expert friend who designed a 16
> bit RISC machine in one of these FPGAs. He was explaining to me how he
> loaded software into memory for his computer since there were no i/o
> devices attached except for a serial port. He said,
>
> "First, I download into the FPGA a serial UART and a DMA device
> which takes data from the serial port and deposits it into memory.
> Then I reset the board and download the CPU into the FPGA and the
> CPU starts executing the program out of memory."
>
> If that doesn't sound like Star Trek I don't know what does.
>
> So one morning, I woke up from a dream. And in my dream I had a robot board
> that had a 68HC11, some RAM, and the whole thing was hooked up to an FPGA
> in a socket next to it. There was a dual motor driver on board with its
> control pins hooked to the FPGA, the FPGA was connected to the 68HC11 bus
> signals, there were additional "high current" I/O pins connected to the
> FPGA as well as protected input pins. I had just finished downloading a PWM
> circuit that attached to the motor controller pins and implemented an i/o
> port in the 68HC11's address space. I then added a timer/interrupt circuit
> that controlled a sonar unit and a another device that I could write out
> servo positioning codes to and it would send out servo signals on the pins
> I specified. Then I added a 38Khz clock circuit (dividing out the CPU
> clock) that drove some IR LEDs that were being modulated and then monitored
> by a digital phase locked loop circuit. I'd used up a thousand gates in the
> FPGA and still had 4000 left so I implemented an additional serial port
> that could drive three pins and had it's interrupts on the 68HC11 IRQ pin.
>
> The scary thing is, this dream is not only possible, it would probably cost
> no more than a 20 - 30% premium over what a handyboard does today.
>
> So, I want to build this sucker (or have someone build it and I'll buy a
> bunch!) I figure the board would have an EEPROM for the FPGA so that a
> "standard" configuration could be loaded into it and sent with boards where
> the user didn't want or need to pay $100 to get the Xilinx tools. Maybe we
> could create a circuits library that could be downloaded into this board
> like a software library.
>
> Comments? Feedback? Would you buy one if it was available? Even if the kit
> cost $300? (rough guess based on a four layer board, F1 version of the
> 68HC11 and XC4005.)
>
> --Chuck
>
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Yet another board
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| Hello Everyone, I've had something of a vision, and I don't think it was spoiled food :-) And I'd like some feedback on it. Bear with me, it requires a bit of set up. After working with Handyboards, Miniboards, 6.270 Boards, BOTBoards and other (...) (25 years ago, 16-Jul-99, to lugnet.robotics.handyboard)
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