iliketurtiles @ iliketurtiles @programming.dev

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Joined

5 mo. ago

Hi Im also a student but with a very a small budget. I figured I'd share some of the very cheap chinese boards Ive found. Cheap means some disadvantages ofcourse. Purchased one of these recently.

1. The first are boards with Altera's Cyclone IV on them. Boards with the EP4CE6 (6K LEs) and EP4CE10 (10K LEs) can be found on AliExpress.

Cyclone IV is supported by Quartus Lite so dev tools will be free. For the fpga itself Intel has documentation but for the peripherals on the board you either rely on the seller emailing config and example code to you, or for the slightly more popular boards can find unofficial stuff strewn around online.

I got one with EP4CE6 (no VGA jack or other bells and whistles, just some LEDs and buttons) for what comes out as 10 euros or so. There are others that resemble proper dev boards (with connectors and stuff like 7-segment displays) costing something like 25 euros.

2. There are also Sipeed Tang FPGA boards. They use Gowin FPGAs and Gowin's IDE is free. The Tang Nano 9k has been shown to run the PicoRV32 RISC-V core. It costs 15 euro on Aliexpress. The downside is that Gowin tools ofcourse wont be as good as Intel's Quartus.

Also interesting to note that the Tang Nano 4K has a Cortex M3 on it so I think it counts as an Fpga-Soc? I think its fun and might get one some time.

Here's a script I use a lot that creates a temporary directory, cds you into it, then cleans up after you exit. Ctrl-D to exit, and it takes you back to the directory you were in before.

Similar to what another user shared replying to this comment but mine is in bash + does these extra stuff.

    
#!/bin/bash

function make_temp_dir {
    # create a temporary directory and cd into it.
    TMP_CURR="$PWD";
    TMP_TMPDIR="$(mktemp -d)";
    cd "$TMP_TMPDIR";
}

function del_temp_dir {
    # delete the temporary directory once done using it.
    cd "$TMP_CURR";
    rm -r "$TMP_TMPDIR";
}

function temp {
    # create an empty temp directory and cd into it. Ctr-D to exit, which will
    # delete the temp directory
    make_temp_dir;
    bash -i;
    del_temp_dir;
}

temp

  

Thanks for your reply, that certainly a method I will try using.

But in the case of my problem I think it won't work. Since adc_data is in the consequent of the implication, it will again be sampled in the prepone region and so take on the value before adc_data_en was asserted high, don't you think?

In my code I set adc_data to its new value and at the same time set adc_data_en high. Perhaps I'm not supposed to do things this way? Is the usual practice to set something like adc_data to it's new value some time before the enable is asserted?

👌

For the IRF1404Z, under the absolute maximum ratings, continuous drain current is given as 140A. If it was for something like picoseconds, it doesn't seem meaningful labeling it 'continuous current'?

Thank you, will give that a go :)