Re: Looking for a low-cost development kit

Johnson

It's not quite true that there are not free tools for FPGAs. Both the
2 biggest vendors Xilinx and Altera have free tools for building the
hardware side for the smaller end FPGAs themselves. Processor support
tools specifically Xilinx has 2 soft core processors that they support
- PicoBlaze and MicroBlaze. Altera have Nios. Picoblaze I believe a
third party has done a C compiler and the group probably has more
details that I do. MicroBlaze (EDK) and Nios toolsets are essentially
paid for tools although there are sometimes evaluation versions around
that are good for short term use.

On I/O things like acceptable voltage levels e.g. 3.3V or 5V
signalling requirements are important. Many modern FPGAs cannot
tolerate 5V signalling levels directly without some protection, or
level shift, circuits. Particular protocols like I2C will need to be
driven and controlled by some logic function within the FPGA user
design. If you are using external modules for bluetooth etc. then
again you need to use whatever signalling levels and protocols are
required to transfer data and setup to the external modules.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On 23 Mar, 21:36, "Johnson L" <gpsab...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"John Adair" <g...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:a38658ca-69a3-4af4-bfde-1c4abf7f7264@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx





Johnson

Can you elaborate on your I/O requirements as this may affect what is
best for your application.

Most of the board vendors in the FPGA world like ourselves don't
supply boards as bundled software kits as such. The software aspect
tends to come from whichever processor core is being used. However
there are one or two Xilinx and Altera kits that include some sort of
tools version with the boards for MicroBlaze and Nios respectively but
they don't tend to be in hobby engineer price area.

For the lowest cost you may have to think about seperate solution for
a microprocessor and board. There various microprocessor cores on
Opencores that are based on popular things like Z80 and so on and
there are lots of tools out there for that common processor. There
also things like 8086/8 cores available from third party vendors
http://www.ht-lab.com/hardware/drigmorn1/drigmorn1.htmlbut these do
cost.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On 23 Mar, 05:08, "Johnson L" <gpsab...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For my hobby work, I am looking for a low-cost development kit to
develope a simple embedded system. This system will measure the
temperature
and heart beat rate, compare them with a predefined table which
implements
some health-care knowledge, then provide some useful information. This
development kit should be low-cost, support C programming, debugging,
better
with JTAG or other on-site debugging. It should support at least one type
of
popular microprocessors, or a mainstream FPGA,
and easy to use. Could anybody recommend me some? Thank you in advance.

Johnson

Thanks, John, your answer is very informative and helpful. However, as a
hobby engineer I don't know how to elaborate the I/O requirements. Could you
please give me a simple example?
As for now, I would like the sensors being connected to the microprocessor
in a simple way, such as I2C or UART. I possibly also need a port for
BLUETOOTH or ZIGBEE to send out the commands to a wireless peripheral.
BTW, if I understand it correct, there is no free or low-cost development
kit for FPGA, right?
Johnson- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

.

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