Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 – Arduino, Cyclone 10 FPGA, MiniPCI Express, MicroHDMI

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/MKRVidor4000

65 35 7 years ago

That thing came out over a year ago, and the page hasn't been updated in nearly as long. From what I've understood you don't get direct access to the FPGA, rather they've made a few basic peripherals like SPI, UART etc that you can enable.

So it is more like a configurable microcontroller, rather than a fully programmable FPGA, at least that's my understanding.

Which I guess makes sense, given that FPGA programming isn't exactly n00b friendly from what I've gathered.

inamberclad2• 7 years ago

Seeing as there's a SystemVerilog tutorial on the Arduino website, I'm hopeful for more.

magicalhippo3• 7 years ago

One would hope it would be a bit more, at least given the price point.

achuwilson2• 7 years ago

Here you go. I have followed this guide to program the fpga from the Intel Quartus IDE http://smartaleks.io/?p=260

tnecniv• 7 years ago

Which I guess makes sense, given that FPGA programming isn't exactly n00b friendly from what I've gathered.

It can be OK. The first class most EE students take at my undergrad uni had a significant FPGA component.

tyingq• 7 years ago

You can program the FPGA, just seems the docs aren't helpful.

https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=602341.0 (response #5 is useful)

magicalhippo3• 7 years ago

Ah nice. I looked at this board a couple of months ago, and all indications I could find then was that the FPGA was not directly programmable. Good to see that's not the case.

ChuckMcM• 7 years ago

The $75 price point is okay.

Not sure what this is trying to be other than an eval board for 'also rans' in the FPGA and Cortex-M space. One of the reasons I like the Lattice FPGA boards like the Icebreaker[1] is that there is a complete open source tool chain for them. Seems like adding a processor to something like that might be an interesting place.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-fpga

inamberclad2• 7 years ago

If you are alright with a softcore, I think a picorv32 will fit on the ice40.

kevin_thibedeau2• 7 years ago

Cyclone outclasses any ICE40 out there. If you need the logic capacity or peripherals your options become constrained. The sad thing is that we had cheap Spartan-3's and Spartan-6's with impressive resources but the vendors didn't want to keep making devices with that sort of bang for the buck.

TD-Linux• 7 years ago

The open tools also work on ECP5, which goes quite a bit bigger than the Cyclone 10 chip on the Arduino and is also pretty cost effective. In fact it's big enough that you can usually dispense with the separate microcontroller - I built a ulx3s which can boot Linux on the ECP5-85.

analognoise4• 7 years ago

You can still buy Spartan 3 and 6 devices - last I checked they're even still being manufactured.

m0zg• 7 years ago

Question for experts in the field: are there any reasonable FPGA options capable of hosting a small (~2MiB) quantized deep learning model for which there's any sort of a viable, open toolchain?

I've looked into some of Lattice's stuff, and some of their chips seem pretty capable for this, but as with all the other FPGA manufacturers, the toolchain is crazy proprietary. I'm not a huge fan of sinking my time into tooling I have no control over.

analognoise4• 7 years ago

There is an open source syntheses and bitstream generation for some lattice devices.

It has inferior QoR compared to the closed toolchain.

robert_foss3• 7 years ago

I think in one of the CCCamp19 talks, the ECP5 routing with the OpenSource tooling blew the Lattice tooling out of the water.

FPGA manufacturers have pretty perverse incentives when it comes to filling your FPGA devices up with useless junk.

buildbot• 7 years ago

Yes! Most Cyclone Vs or Zync/Artix chips can support quantized networks, and people have been making them easier to get started with, for example this toolchain[1]: https://github.com/danielholanda/LeFlow

Can take Tensorflow models and convert them to Verilog. Tensorflow already has lots of tools to train quantized models, so all you need to do is convert them to hardware.

If you had a big enough Lattice FPGA you the open source Yosys toolchain, or use one of the Vendor proprietary toolchains for Altera/Xilinx.

[1] Disclaimer - I went to school with the creator of LeFlow.

robert_foss3• 7 years ago

The Lattice ECP5 is supported by open source tooling, does it support your usecase otherwise?

ryanmjacobs2• 7 years ago

Shameless self-plug for something similar in the market: WebFPGA (https://webfpga.io/kickstarter). This service actually exposes the full FPGA and allows you to synthesize Verilog remotely (or offline).

peter_d_sherman• 7 years ago

Love your project!

Now it has its own article on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21057511

Remember to upvote!

(Oh, and "You're welcome!" :-) <g>)

ryanmjacobs2• 7 years ago

Great! Thank you! I definitely see a lot of room for improvement in this field.

jacobush• 7 years ago

Commented and upvoted.

lnsru2• 7 years ago

Is the VHDL or Verilog code for MicroHDMI and CSI-2 interfaces available somewhere?

Not sure if this board will be wild success. Diligent has better boards with Xilinx Artix-7 for this price. Arrow MAX1000 is even more affordable. Intel MAX10 is a great device! Learning FPGA means always learning quirks of vendor’s IDE.

panpanna2• 7 years ago

Can someone try Clifford Wolf's tiny risc-v on this fpga?

I'm mainly interested in size and speed for this specific chip and speed grade.

LIV2• 7 years ago

Title is slightly misleading, it isss the mini-pci express connector but the FPGA itself can't talk pci-express as it lacks the necessary transceivers

trollied• 7 years ago

Link to the actual board: https://store.arduino.cc/mkr-vidor-4000

€62.90

Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 – Arduino, Cyclone 10 FPGA, MiniPCI Express, MicroHDMI

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