[Arm-netbook] Interesting chip the LPC1343

[joem]

On Tue, 2013-12-17 at 10:00 +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 9:06 AM, joem <joem at martindale-electric.co.uk> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I ordered this FPGA dev system:
> >
> > http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1575992013/logi-fpga-development-board-for-raspberry-pi-beagl
> >
> > [Already over subscribed by x5 and still 24 days to go :)  ]
> >
> > I found it has a $2 LPC1343 ARM cortex chip
> 
> http://www.microbuilder.eu/Projects/LPC1343ReferenceDesign/
> 
> sold by adafruit.  good find, joe.  will look at the datasheet, see
> what else it can do.


The FPGA logi boards are not too bad an idea for EOMAs as well.
It can add an FPGA board option more cheaply than other solutions.

The FPGA programmer is an LPC1343 built into their board which manages
the communication between the raspberry pi and the FPGA.
From their links, circuit diagrams and a lot of software is available
that allows drag and drop programming of the binary files
generated by the free Linux capable (6GB) Xilinx VHDL compiler
from the raspberry to the FPGA.

But so far, not been able to locate what software goes
into the LPC1343 or whether that software is open sourced.

If it is open sourced, then you would be able to modify
it to work with EOMA. Then you can drag and drop FPGA
files from EOMA into the FPGA.

The benefit is that you should be able to make a lot
hardware projects work very quickly.
E.g. make a 50MHz storage scope - no problem!
The EOMA drives LCD and there is several distros already working,
so its very quick to knock up something that does
the hardware functions in FPGA, and the displaying in EOMA.

The FPGA they use is not the fastest in the world - but it works.
It is capable of compiling and running a microBlaze CPU
which can run Linux. You could also add stuff from
opencores.org like low speed ethernet, usb, video controller etc
and get it all working very quickly to make your own custom
very fast hardware gadgets that money cannot buy, or is
too expensive to prototype using individual components.