SparkFun's Snō Shoe Brings Full-Size HDMI, Qwiic, and USB Type-C to the Alorium Snō FPGA Dev Board
Smart add-on ties in to a VGA HDMI accelerator block running on the FPGA to offer text and graphical output.
Anyone looking to add video output to an Alorium Technology Snō FPGA development board now has a low-cost, add-on designed to make life easier: SparkFun's SparkX Snō Shoe.
"We love the Alorium Technology Snō Development Board! Alorium have done a really great job in integrating an ATmega328-compatible core into the FPGA, which you can then program from the Arduino IDE and access the features of a Verilog Xcelerator Block (XB) from normal Arduino code," SparkFun writes. "You can even include your favorite SparkFun libraries and use them as if you were running the code on a RedBoard!"
"One of our engineers loves the Snō so much, he took one on holiday with him and remixed Sameer Puri’s HDL Util Verilog so it would run on the Snō as a VGA HDMI Xcelerator Block. The XB allows you to display VGA text and graphics on any monitor that supports 640x480 pixels."
While the rewritten XB is usable with a common or garden HDMI breakout board, SparkFun decided to go one step further and build a custom add-on — the Snō Shoe. The board includes a full-size HDMI connector linked to four pairs of FPGA pins, a Qwiic connector for further expansion, a USB Type-C socket for power and serial data, and a CH340E USB interface chip so no external programmer is required.
"The Snō Shoe has been designed so you can mount the Snō on the top of the Shoe," the company notes, "or underneath, depending on your preference. A reset button and I2C split pads are accessible in both configurations."
As a SparkX product, though, there's one word of caution: The board has been rapidly produced, but while it has been tested it does not come with SparkFun's usual guarantees nor live technical support. There's also no promise that they'll make the jump to a properly-stocked product in the future — meaning that, at any given time, the stock of a SparkX board SparkFun has could be the only stock there will ever be.
The Snō Shoe is now on sale for $9.95; for those who don't yet have a Snō to which it can be connected, the boards are available separately for $53.95.