I enjoyed playing with FPGAs and all the open-source tooling makes it so much quicker and easier.
That said, I never understood the appeal of the FOMU. It's cool that it fits in a USB port, but so little IO, there's not a lot I can think to do with it.
Has anyone heard of some cool projects that others have done with this hardware?
Fantastic little device! Relating to the post, I also happened to brick one erasing the Foboot bootloader by writing the flash beyond the limit (there was a bug regarding writing to addresses beyond max at the time, but then I was pushing the limit by abusing dfu-utils :) https://x.com/sylefeb/status/1391898565061001225 ). I tried to use the programming pads but at the time was lacking the skills and it ended in disaster (ripped pads...).
The primary appeal of these minimalist devices is to get people started as cheaply as possible.
They exist at a price point where it’s an easy decision to pick one up on a whim and spend an evening installing the toolchain and building some little hello world tutorial.
I suppose you could create your own crypto wallet or something, but agreed, an FPGA without I/O is not a very interesting or useful thing. You'd be better off with a conventional microcontroller, I'd think.
I enjoyed playing with FPGAs and all the open-source tooling makes it so much quicker and easier.
That said, I never understood the appeal of the FOMU. It's cool that it fits in a USB port, but so little IO, there's not a lot I can think to do with it.
Has anyone heard of some cool projects that others have done with this hardware?
Hi there, a while ago I had a ton of fun with the Fomu: https://x.com/sylefeb/status/1571489610647371776
Fantastic little device! Relating to the post, I also happened to brick one erasing the Foboot bootloader by writing the flash beyond the limit (there was a bug regarding writing to addresses beyond max at the time, but then I was pushing the limit by abusing dfu-utils :) https://x.com/sylefeb/status/1391898565061001225 ). I tried to use the programming pads but at the time was lacking the skills and it ended in disaster (ripped pads...).
The code repo for the overall project is here: https://github.com/sylefeb/tinygpus
The primary appeal of these minimalist devices is to get people started as cheaply as possible.
They exist at a price point where it’s an easy decision to pick one up on a whim and spend an evening installing the toolchain and building some little hello world tutorial.
I suppose you could create your own crypto wallet or something, but agreed, an FPGA without I/O is not a very interesting or useful thing. You'd be better off with a conventional microcontroller, I'd think.
> You'd be better off with a conventional microcontroller, I'd think.
Or with a more conventional FPGA development board like Icebreaker:
https://1bitsquared.com/products/icebreaker
I aggressively enjoyed this post