Papilio Plus Prototypes available for $84.99 in the store.


Jack Gassett

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Maybe a bit off topic, but I was noting that the de0-nano has a price tag of 79$ and uses a BGA package for the FPGA. I have no knowledge of those extremely low priced boards, but it would seem to be feasible to get a PPro with a BGA package within an acceptable price range. Of course I don't have any idea on the BOM costs.

Pizus

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I have been asking a bit about that de0-nano in this thread:

I also included there an discussion I had with someone in dangerousprototypes blogpost about it, but I know next to nothing about this, but hope that Mike/Hamster is coming to the rescue :)

Altera is another platform, another tools etc, but if there is more capabilities on that cheap board, it would be cool if one made an wing extension for it, to use the exisiting wings, and perhaps use Mike's fpga course on both platforms.

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The news that we have all been waiting to hear.... (Drum roll).............................

I just got word from Seeed Studio that the first batch of Papilio Pro boards is in production and we should see them available by November 24th!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm so excited, I can't wait to get these boards in the hands of Papilio enthusiasts. :)

Jack.

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Maybe a bit off topic, but I was noting that the de0-nano has a price tag of 79$ and uses a BGA package for the FPGA. I have no knowledge of those extremely low priced boards, but it would seem to be feasible to get a PPro with a BGA package within an acceptable price range. Of course I don't have any idea on the BOM costs.

Pizus

From earlier discussions, the problem isn't the per-unit price, it is the upfront costs required to produce the first batch - commitments for minimum numbers and so on. I don't know about Jack, but I wouldn't want to be financing a 10,000 unit run at $50 per board,

If I won the lottery I would gladly finance it, but I can't ask Jack to risk the cost of a house to provide me with one shiny new toy,

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I would like to have been born in a place where houses cost 10K$

Here in Rome, a medium sized flat is at about 350K$ :)

Anyway, I'll have to carefully check the manufacturing costs of next board (feat. a S6, an ext uC etc) that I am going to use in my job.

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Pizus, If you get hold of Magnus (magnus@saanlima.com) he has a design that you could be put into production with the Pipistrello - http://pipistrello.s..._to_Pipistrello

When we last chatted he had no plans to bring the design to market, but everybody is keen to get one. All the R&D work has been done (I have a nice shiny LX45 model...).

Would you be interested in financing, manufacturing and marketing them? They are pretty impressive little boards...

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I know the pipistrello board. But ...I am not the board designer, only the section manager :( and I have suggested the design team to take a look at that board too.

I'd be really interested in a pipistrello, I think a lot of us would be. The LX45 seems awesome. I work at a school, if they get manufactured by someone, I might convince the school to buy a lot to use as a teaching platform fpga-audio-dsp platform.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I just did a quick look around and the closest Spartan 6 board I see is the Avnet MicroBoard for $89. I think a price of $84.99 for the Papilio Pro seems pretty fair compared to the other Spartan 6 boards on the market. Does anyone know of any other Spartan 6 boards to compare pricing to?

Jack.

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...Does anyone know of any other Spartan 6 boards to compare pricing to?

Jack.

Just for the record, there's the Bunny's (the "Chumby" guy) NeTV open source design with a SP6-LX9:

http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=NeTV_Main_Page

that box goes at $119 here: http://adafruit.com/products/609

of course it's not a general purpose design but AFAIK it was born for showcasing the HDMI passthrough hack completely open.

it has got a Marvell PXA168 controller onboard too, that i suppose it's expensive too.

bye

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Ok, it's good to know the pricing of that board. I think at $84.99 we have very good pricing on the Papilio Pro compared to everyone else.

LX9 with 64Mbit (8MByte) of SDRAM, easy extensibility, $5 for domestic shipping and $7 for international shipping is less expensive then anything else out there. The Avnet Microboard is the closest offering, but they really get you with tacked on fees and shipping. I tried to order one, I think they are great boards, but aborted when the final price came to $104...

Jack.

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To keep things simple in the beginning it is only being offered with 64Mbit (8MByte) of SDRAM, but the footprint will handle up to 512Mbit (64MByte) of SDRAM. I'm kicking around the idea of offering a service to upgrade the memory, but will have to see how feasible that is. The SDRAM chip is probably the easiest surface mount package there is out there to replace. The pins are so far apart that it is a piece of cake to replace, but you do need a hot air station to get it off, or use chipquick or something like that. You could also snip the leads off the old chip and then remove the leftover from each individual pad. Then soldering the new chip on is a piece of cake if you use the soldering drag technique. You could use a $5 radio shack soldering iron to do it.

It takes me less then 30 seconds to pull the old chip off and put a new one on with a hot air soldering station, so it might be best to just offer that option.

Jack.

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