1BitSquared Opens Orders for the Glasgow Interface Explorer, a "Scots Army Knife" for Electronics
Multi-function FPGA-powered interface tool ships in May, priced at $139 plus $50 for a custom CNC-milled aluminium case.
1BitSquared has officially opened its crowdfunding campaign for the Glasgow, a "Scots Army Knife" multi-tool powered by a Lattice Semiconductor iCE40 FPGA and designed to make it simple to interface with as wide a range of electronic devices as possible.
Early last year the company unveiled Revision C of the Glasgow board, an open-source design which offers a wide range of functionalities of use to everyone from electrical engineers to hackers: As of the firmware available at the time, the board could: Bring up a UART with automatic detection of the baud rate required; initiate SPI and I2C transactions; read and write to and from 24-series electrically erasable programmable read-only memories (EEPROMs) and 25-series flash memories, the latter with automatic parameter determination via SFDP.
In addition, the board can: Read and write any ONFI-compatible flash with automatic parameter determination; program and verify AVR microcontrollers over SPI; play back JTAG SVF files; debug ARC processors over JTAG; debug a subset of MIPS processors via EJATG; program and verify XC9500XL CPLDs; and a range of progressively more esoteric tricks, including synthesise sound via a Yamaha OPL audio chip and play it via a web page and read magnetic flux data from 5.25" or 3.5" floppy.
The design available to order via the crowdfunding campaign is functionally identical to the original Revision C design: "Compared to the revC1 that some of you might have built yourself," 1BitSquare'd Piotr Esden-Tempski explains, "we made some minor design for manufacture (DFM) improvements as well as some other changes that allow supply current measurements."
As with its earlier incarnation, the Glasgow includes 16 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins running at up to 100MHz, independent direction control, pull-up/down resistors, and 1V8 to 5V logic compatibility with up to 150mA of power supply available on each pin. The software, meanwhile, is Python 3-based, including a Migen-based core for the FPGA which drives the board. Both hardware and software are licensed permissively, under the 0-Clause BSD and Apache 2.0 licenses.
The Glasgow is now available to back on Crowd Supply, priced at $139 for the board and cable bundle, plus an additional $50 for a CNC-milled anodized aluminium case. Shipping is expected t begin by the end of May this year.