Arrow FPGA contest

[FrankBuss]

See here:
https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/events/european-fpga-developer-contest-2019
The prizes are not that great, but looks like you can get a nice free FPGA development board by just providing an interesting project description. It says "European Contest", so I don't know if you can register if you live outside Europe, but there are no rules written on the page which restricts it.

[capt bullshot]

One could get these dev boards for free at embedded world 2018 and 2019 ...
Looks like one of the usual promotions, and Arrow hoping to harvest some application ideas from the entries. A couple of years ago I found my application idea (submitted to get a dev board for free) appearing in an article  published in one of these electronics marketing magazines. Never mind, I also won a second (or third, don't remember) prize for my idea (and its prototype stage realisation).

Odds to win a real prize in these competitions aren't too bad if you submit a half decent prototype realisation of your idea, apparently not many people do so, many appear to just collect the board.

[Againgly]

A good start for the development of your project in any case. Although there are many who wish, there is always a chance. I know a few people who have succeeded this way. It’s not working out for me yet.

[kizmit99]

It says "European Contest", so I don't know if you can register if you live outside Europe, but there are no rules written on the page which restricts it.

Just an FYI -- I tried entering (back in early July) and got an email back that very nicely said they couldn't ship to the US...

[RoGeorge]

Did you received any confirmation after registering a project from Europe?

I've register a project today, and first time something went wrong, and I got an error message.  Then, I tried again with all the browser's addons disabled, and the registration was accepted, no errors displayed.

However, I received no confirmation email, so at this point I don't know if this is normal, or if there are still registration errors.   

[FrankBuss]

I don't think I got a confirmation eMail, just the board.

[Macbeth]

Thanks for the heads up FrankBuss 

I received mine today in an ordinary letter with a hand written label and post mark from Germany. I did get an email confirmation on 19/10. The deadline for these is 31/10 so if anyone wants one best be quick! 

I've been messing with my Cyclone 10 board all evening. Got the TEI0003 NIOS demo code working with the RAM test, spirit level and Knightrider lights but was kind of disappointed that no simpler instructions where given for something like doing a blinky project from scratch. I wouldn't mind if the NIOS demo included developing from scratch but it's just a pre-configured project and instructions on how to compile the Quartus project (not the NIOS code) and flash. No documentation of the source code.

I did eventually find the TEI0001 user guide for the MAX 10 including a blinky and only had to do some pin swapping, it works great. Have to convert the .sof to a .jic for the flash is the other difference.

I have to admit there's a big learning curve and I do not think I have any chance of meeting the project submission date of 15/11 

[RoGeorge]

I still didn't get any board yet, but installed Quartus Lite 18.1 out of curiosity.

On Ubuntu, if you get an error about a missing libpng12.0.so, you need to download it from

    https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/i386/libpng12-0/download
    https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/amd64/libpng12-0/download

and install the appropriate one (32 or 64 bits), i.e.

Code: [Select]

    cd ~/Downloads
    sudo dpkg -i ./libpng12-0_1.2.54-1ubuntu1.1_amd64.deb

Quartus looks and feels like it was made by the same guys that made Vivado, they even use TCL, both!   

It's nice that Quartus still have a schematic editor.  Altera didn't dropped it like Xilinx did long time ago.  It felt very nostalgic to be able to draw draw gates or plain ICs from the SN7400 series instead of VHDL.

Anybody started the work for the Arrow competition?  If yes, what theme/project?

[FrankBuss]

I'm working on a project. Don't know if I can finish it in time, but at least the VGA output works now:
https://twitter.com/frank_buss/status/1193395941069479936

[radiolistener]

I have to admit there's a big learning curve and I do not think I have any chance of meeting the project submission date of 15/11 

the same

I also didn't get any confirmation. Tried to contact them, but also no response.

After all I installed drivers, and it works ok, but there is too small time to complete project and it appears that these boards have FTDI chip connection scheme which doesn't allows to use FTDI chip in a single channel synchronous FIFO mode. Sadly it limits communication abilities of this board. But at least this is a good opportunity for learning. With this board, I tried NIOS for the first time

You can find example project files with blinker demo on trenz-electronic.de site.

[FrankBuss]

Not enough time to finish it, but the base is working. Now it needs only some more time to finish the RISC-V software side, porting newlib etc., maybe in the holidays.

Presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Aq2wywVWYW11twUHuTIj5MzapHc_T0tL/view

Was fun to learn LiteX, will use it more often for future projects. It makes it much easier to develop FPGA projects.

[Brumby]

Was fun to learn LiteX, will use it more often for future projects. It makes it much easier to develop FPGA projects.

If you are just one of a larger audience, the objective of the competition has been achieved.


I've been intrigued by FPGAs, but don't have the time (that I would like) to get my head into them.  (My to do list is not short - and most of it is uninspiring.)

[capt bullshot]

Not enough time to finish it, but the base is working. Now it needs only some more time to finish the RISC-V software side, porting newlib etc., maybe in the holidays.

Looks like it's enough to win a price. From my limited experience, providing something that works somehow is nearly a guarantee to win a price in such kind of contest.

[FrankBuss]

I won a prize, the Neural Compute Stick:



But the contest page is gone (but can be still found with archive.org) and I asked about a list of the other entries, but no answer. This could be done better. But was still interesting for me to learn something new about FPGAs and how to use LiteX for it.

[RoGeorge]

Congrats!   

[FrankBuss]

Thanks. Too bad that they didn't publish the entries so far, would be interesting to see which one won the first prize.

[Brumby]

Congratulations indeed.

Thanks. Too bad that they didn't publish the entries so far, would be interesting to see which one won the first prize.

That is disappointing.  At the very least, it takes away from the interest that such a competition can generate.