gadgetbox New Papilio Flex Motherboard - GadgetBox Compatible

[Jack Gassett]

I've been working on a new Papilio board - code name Papilio Flex.

Papilio Flex is meant to address the following things:

• There is a lot of confusion about which FPGA board a new comer should purchase. The Papilio Pro with SDRAM or the Papilio DUO with SRAM? I want to clear up this confusion and make a single base board that can be expanded to be exactly what you need. Then the choice is between Arduino footprint and GadgetBox footprint instead of technical features.
• We need a low cost option without USB or external RAM for for small IoT projects. 
• We need to allow a high speed USB interface.
• We need to allow people to swap out SRAM or SDRAM or DDR memory depending on what is best for their application.

The features of this new Papilio Flex board:

• There is a bare minimum on the base board. Just Spartan 6 FPGA (in the cheapest footprint), switching power supply, and two PCI express connectors. 
• One PCI express connector is to add a USB addon and the other is for a memory addon.
• The entire board uses the Universal eCog Scheme to allow a GadgetBox enclosure and eCog peripherals to be used with the FPGA board.

Here are the design files:

https://github.com/GadgetFactory/GadgetBox-Hardware/tree/master/hardware/GadgetBox-Papilio-Flex

Would love to hear people's ideas and feedback.

[Felix]

thats pretty nice jack.  i was about to ask you last night if you had an fpga motherboard for gadgetbox and you answered my question without my asking it.

 

is the eCog slot B silk right? (shows 1C 2C ...)

also in case you missed it, in glitter,

A_1 .. A_7
B_1 .. B_7
C_1 .. C_7
D_1 .. D_7

will work in the Arduino IDE and should work elsewhere (you could just make it a library/include)

#define A_1 D1
or
#define A_1 1
or
#define A_1 A1

etc so it wont conflict with analog pins / binary notation.

then its just a matter of identifying which pins are analog
which you could just use ~ on the silk beside it like everyone else does.

or fill in the silk around the pin solid white or something.
 

 

[Jack Gassett]

Yes, looks like I'm going to need to change the numbering on the silkscreen. 

I also like Ae0, Ae1, ... Ae7, Be0 ... Be7

Jack.

[Felix]

Ae#;Be#;Ce#;De# works. i like it. certainly better than some of the other options