Luke Valenty Resurrects the TinyFPGA BX Development Board, Targets Shipment in May 2023
Enough components for over 2,500 boards secured, clearing the pre-order backlog with plenty to spare — at a higher price, mind you.
Luke Valenty has confirmed that the TinyFPGA BX development board is coming back from the dead, with a new production run planed for spring 2023 — finally delivering on all outstanding pre-orders, but bringing with it a price hike for new buyers.
"TinyFPGA experienced a variety of roadblocks, including supplier and manufacturer changes, global components shortages, extremely long lead times for FPGAs, and price increases that have further delayed production," Valenty explains of the difficulties that have kept the low-cost TinyFPGA development board out of buyers' hands. "All of these factors combined to made it difficult to provide accurate, transparent information, but we still should have kept you up to date on the issues we were facing. We’re truly sorry for not communicating sooner about these delays, or being transparent about the issues we were having."
The good news is that the issues are finally in hand: a stock of more than 2,500 FPGAs and other critical components has been secured and the TinyFPGA BX is going into production in early 2023 — with those waiting on outstanding orders to expect a delivery some time in May next year.
The specifications of the TinyFPGA BX remain unchanged from its launch on Crowd Supply: a compact 1.4×0.7" breadboard-friendly development board built around the Lattice Semi iCE40LP8K field-programmable gate array (FPGA), which provides 7,680 four-input lookup tables, 128kb of block RAM, a phase-locked loop (PLL), and a total of 41 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, to which Valenty has added 8Mb of SPI flash storage.
The next production run should be enough to clear all back-orders and leave Valenty with a healthy stock of boards for future customers, but those looking to pick one up will be doing so at a premium. "Increasing component and production costs have led to higher prices for many hardware products," Valenty explains.
"The price of TinyFPGA BX has remained the same on our site for years, and hasn’t kept up with the changing landscape of hardware manufacturing. As a result, we need to update the price of TinyFPGA BX by raising it to $49 for future customers. This price change goes into affect only for newly-placed orders."
More information is available in Valenty's latest Crowd Supply campaign update, where new orders can be placed at the revised price; the TinyFPGA AX1 and AX2, meanwhile, remain listed as "no longer available."
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