Devices containing repurposable FPGAs

[Foxxz]

I enjoy when people take a device or toy and repurpose it for another use or expand its capabilities. This is common with things containing microcontrollers. I'm interested to know what is out there that contains an FPGA and could be repurposed such as the Pano Logic boxes.

[Berni]

FPGAs tend to be quite a bit more complicated and usually come in BGA packages so it is hard to trace out what connects where on the PCB. The bigger FPGA chips also need a very expensive license for the vendors IDE to even compile code for it.

A lot of the time FPGAs are also tightly embeded into a system and don't provide a whole lot of useful IO to the outside. So it might make more sense to steal the FPGA from the board and make your own board. But this does take a fair bit of effort due to it being BGA and the board you make might need to have a great deal of support circuitry (boot memory, gazilion supply voltages etc..) so that is a fair bit of effort too.

At some point it might be easier to just simply buy a <100$ FPGA dev board and go with that.

[chickenHeadKnob]

Search terms:
 EBAZ4205  - these are the reclaimed head controllers for crypto miners. At one time available from taobao at like $7 bucks a piece. very nice.
                      The supply is waining and they   are more expensive now.

Colorlight lattice ecp5 - these also are good.

As Berni says most boards are not worth it due to the amount of reverse engineering needed. The two boards I listed above have relatively good documentation.

[Someone]

https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic

[voltsandjolts]

The rev-eng'd schematic for the Kingst LA1016/LA2016 logic analysers is available on the sigrok site:
https://sigrok.org/wiki/Kingst_LA2016
It has a Cypress EZ-USB mcu connected to a Cyclone 4 (EP4CE6, probably usable as EP4CE10) with 1Gb DDR2.
It could be repurposed as some other fpga-to-usb type device.

But there are cheaper dev boards available that would achieve the same thing while being more convenient.

So, is re-purposing hardware actually worth all the effort of creating schematic etc.?
Maybe in some specific cases but in general I think not.

[mikeselectricstuff]

the controllers for LED screens are typically a FPGA, SRAM, a couple of ethernet PHYs and lots of buffered digital outputs. Not sure what FPGA they're using these days.
Search "led receiving card" on aliexpress

[thinkfat]

Search terms:
 EBAZ4205  - these are the reclaimed head controllers for crypto miners. At one time available from taobao at like $7 bucks a piece. very nice.
                      The supply is waining and they   are more expensive now.

Colorlight lattice ecp5 - these also are good.

As Berni says most boards are not worth it due to the amount of reverse engineering needed. The two boards I listed above have relatively good documentation.

This! The EBAZ4205 have a Zynq-7000 SoC and you get a dual-core Cortex-A9 coupled with some smaller Virtex (I think) FPGA and a lot of break-out connectors, too. Some small modifications necessary (one Schottky diode for the power supply to be added, and maybe a crystal for the ethernet PHY). You'll need the Xilinx Vivado suite, but you get a free license after registration.

[Doctorandus_P]

This one is worth mentioning in this context too:
(Even though it is an old topic).

https://hackaday.com/2020/01/24/new-part-day-led-driver-is-fpga-dev-board-in-disguise/

[langwadt]

Search terms:
 EBAZ4205  - these are the reclaimed head controllers for crypto miners. At one time available from taobao at like $7 bucks a piece. very nice.
                      The supply is waining and they   are more expensive now.

Colorlight lattice ecp5 - these also are good.

As Berni says most boards are not worth it due to the amount of reverse engineering needed. The two boards I listed above have relatively good documentation.

This! The EBAZ4205 have a Zynq-7000 SoC and you get a dual-core Cortex-A9 coupled with some smaller Virtex (I think) FPGA ...

more like an Artix7

[dietert1]

Some years ago we bought a bunch of Trenz TE0722 modules, also labeled "Soft propeller" or DIPFORTy1. It comes with Zynq™ 7010 and 16 MByte Flash and a SD card slot, currently at € 84.

Regards, Dieter

[RoGeorge]

Once I've reverse engineered a defective office printer-display/front-panel (printer model HP Color Laserjet 4730 MFP).
Turned the panel into a devboard, to learn FPGA, and wrote a FPGA "tutorial" for the absolute beginner. 

Posted that in a Romanian forum.  After a while the pics hosting website tinypic com closed, which made the posted text futile without images.  Still have the pics, the HP board and the schematics extracted back then.  Might repost all that in English one day.

At some point I've mentioned my first FPGA devboard was a printer front panel, and one of the Hackaday redactors (thank you Lewin Day) wrote about that:  https://hackaday.com/2017/02/27/printer-scrap-becomes-fpga-devboard/

Made a crude polyphonic musical instrument from that HP printer panel, as a FPGA demo:

[DiTBho]

Lewin Day wrote about that

In late 90s and early 2000 there were no low cost development boards, everything(3) in "kit form" cost more than 400-500 euros at least(1), and if today with 50 euros you can get yourself a PIC32 board on Olimex with a built-in debug-port for a 20 euro debug-cable, in 2000 the only low cost MIPS board was a IDT, at no less than 2000 euros(2), with neither software nor debugger.

Thus, (edit: my personal opinion) in the past, there was a real need to hack things in order to repurpose them; today it's like decorating your handrail with bicycle rims 


(1) my SpartanIII-1600 was 500 euro, now it's about 60 euro on eBay!!!
(2) my university bought a couple from Newark, 2000 euro each, + 1000 euro for the support.
(3) a stupid Altera Flex10K board *WITHOUT* the flash-bootstrapping-chip, was 90 euro!!!

[cfbsoftware]

At some point it might be easier to just simply buy a <100$ FPGA dev board and go with that.

Joel Williams maintains a useful list which includes many such boards:

https://www.joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards

[NiHaoMike]

There's the SQRL Acorn if you're looking for a lot of processing power, but it has very little I/O.

[RoGeorge]

Another one, used by Bluetooth module from around 2004. 

On the back side of the PCB it is written "EPB-6805101-03" and "CWI 104".  Has a Xilinx SPARTAN XC2S15 FPGA and a LMX5452 Bluetooth chip.

The connector is 2x25 pins, with the same pin spacing as a Compact Flash card, but without the sideways plastic guide rails of a CF card.