BrisbaneSilicon's ELM11 Feather, a Lua-Native Dual-Core FPGA Dev Board, Opens Crowdfunding

BrisbaneSilicon has opened crowdfunding for its ELM11 Feather, a GOWIN FPGA-powered dual-core microcontroller board designed to be Lua native and highly reconfigurable, swimming against the tide of MicroPython-powered development boards..

"ELM11 Feather is a new microcontroller board that is natively programmable in Lua , C, SystemVerilog, and VHDL," explains BrisbaneSilicon's Craig Haywood. "It aims to complement the current offering of scriptable, Feather-compatible microcontroller boards while providing several unique features. ELM11 Feather is the only scriptable microcontroller board natively programmable in Lua, and it supports full-stack programmability and customization from the hardware layer upwards."

BrisbaneSilicon unveiled the ELM11 Feather back in February, promising a low-cost Lua-native hardware-reconfigurable microcontroller board development board built around the GOWIN GW1NR-9, a field-programmable gate array featuring 8k look-up tables (LUTs) and 1MB of RAM — though some resources are given over to turn the FPGA into a system-on-chip by pre-loading it with a dual-core 75MHz soft-core CPU, up from 70MHz in pre-production prototypes.

The hardware is one thing, but it's the software support that really makes the ELM11 Feather stand out. While most development boards expect the user to program them in C/C++ or MicroPython, the ELM11-Feature is built to be Lua-native — a language developed in 1993 at Brazil's Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro's Computer Graphics Technology Group as a more accessible alternative to Tcl.

The board presents its two CPU cores independently, offering two read-evaluate-print loops (REPLs) — or code can be loaded and executed from flash storage. Development can occur at the command line, its creator say, or using a graphical integrated development environment dubbed Arvore. Its hardware layout is designed to be compatible with the popular Feather form factor, with one exception: there are no analog pins, but 23 digital general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins with pulse-width modulation (PWM) support, UART, SPI, and I2C buses, and five user-addressable LEDs.

The FPGA fabric can be used to customize the hardware via overlays, which sit below the Emblua real-time operating system. "Think similar to the Programmable IO [Input/Output blocks] offered by [Raspberry] Pi Pico," Haywood explains, "however much more flexible and powerful." Alternatively, users can write their own gateware in SystemVerilog or VHDL.

The ELM11 Feather is now available to pre-order via Crowd Supply at $39, though while BrisbaneSilicon has a proven track record and a sound manufacturing and logistics plan that doesn't necessarily guarantee hardware delivery by the planned November shipping date. The company has also pledged to release hardware schematics and application programming interface (API) sources under the permissive MIT license after the crowdfunding campaign has closed.