Hey, just wondering how much Alchitry will grow. I would like to see support for boards besides Alchitry’s, because using Vivado makes me want to claw my eyes out. More tutorials on Verilog and VHDL will be nice too. All in all, seeing Alchitry expand to new fields wont be a bad idea in my opinion.
To my understanding, there is no lockout that would prevent to use Labs with any board as long as it have one of the supported FPGAs, but in the end you will need to manually use the board’s tool to upload the bitstream since the Alchitry Loader is specific to Alchitry boards.
OK, thank you for the reply. Using some workaround is not what I meant, i meant uploading to other boards besides Alchitry’s directly from Labs, like Vivado. I really like the way Labs is built, and I would prefer to use Labs instead of Vivado for my boards. Anyways, this is a question of how much Alchitry can do, but the point is, I would like to use Labs instead of Vivado. I am at a crossover, where on one side, I have Vivado and Quartus, in which I can use Verilog and VHDL without issues, and can program pretty much any FPGA board i want, and on the other side I have Alchitry, which has a much nicer user experience and tutorials with little documentation or support on the industry standard languages, Verilog and VHDL.
I’ve thought about this a decent amount but there’s not a lot of incentive for me to spend time adding support for other people’s boards. The VAST majority of the cost/development time for all the Alchitry products is around Alchitry Labs and tutorials. We give that all away for free with the expectation that the hardware sales will cover the costs at some point. If a 3rd party wanted official support, I’d be open to it for some kind of shared revenu.
OK, thanks for the reply.
Is Alchitry considering any boards besides FPGAs? A microcontroller that can be programed and used, or maybe plugged on top of the Au, Cu, Pt, etc. so that they can communicate like in the Hexapod project, but cleaner.
We likely won’t ever make a board with a microcontroller on it but there are a few solutions to this already.
If you are using something like an Arduino, using the QWIIC connector and the FPGA as an I2C peripheral is a good choice. I did this with the ClockClock project.
With the Pt, I’m planning to make a Pi Hat that will allow it to connect to the Raspberry Pi 5 over PCIe.
There are many different solutions each with pros and cons depending on your project. If you have a project in mind I’d be happy to offer something more specific. It mostly boils down to the bandwidth you need.
Would be nice though.