Look upon this conference badge and kiss your free time goodbye. The 2019 Hackaday Superconference badge is an ECP5 FPGA running a RISC-V core in a Game Boy form factor complete with cartridge slot that is more open than anything we’ve ever seen before: multiple open-source CPU designs were embedded in an open system, developed using the cutting-edge in open-source FPGA tools, and running (naturally) open-source software on top. It’s a 3,000-in-one activity kit for hardware people, software people, and everyone in between.

The brainchild of Jeroen Domburg (aka Sprite_TM), this design has been in the works since the beginning of this year. For more than 500 people headed to Supercon next week, this is a source of both geeky entertainment and learning for three action-packed days and well beyond. Let’s take a look at what’s on the badge, what you need to know to hack it, and how the design serves as a powerful development tool long after the badge hacking ceremonies have wrapped up.

The Big Story is Openness

Over the past few years several people have asked to design a Hackaday conference badge around an FPGA, but only this year did we think the time was right. FPGAs have finally achieved an all-encompassing level of openness as several open source toolchains are maturing and the RISC-V core delivers an powerful and modern instruction set architecture to the open source ecosystem.

This is a huge project, and Jeroen has been doing an unbelievable amount of heavy lifting, but to support the effort a large badge team as rushed in to aid in stabilizing the design, rooting out and fixing bugs in the toolchains, designing workshops around the badge to help teach FPGA principles, and writing C programs that run on top of it all.

This is not to be understated — working with this hardware as a distributed engineering team is a celebration of open truly means. The end result is that you can poke and prod almost any level of the system from the solder and silicon up.

The Hardware

I suspect it’s the gritty details you’re after so here’s the chip rundown. The FPGA is the Lattice LFE5U-45F, an ECP5 with 45k LUTs. For the uninitiated, that’s a huge chip — the biggest would be the 85k but this is still more than you will likely ever need in three days of hacking. (I’d love it if you proved me wrong.) Supporting that chip are two Lyontek LY68L6400 64 Mbit SPI SRAM chips and a Winbond W25Q128JVSIQ 128 Mbit NOR flash chip. In theory you could just barely run Linux on this badge; seeing someone hang extra DDR memory off of the cartridge slot would be a great hack to make Linux purr would be fun, wouldn’t it?

In keeping with the Game Boy form factor, you’ll find a beautiful 480 …read more

Source:: Hackaday