Jake -
On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 02:10:25PM -0700, Jake Watters wrote:
The first FPGA class seems to have gone well!
Thanks! I guess the level of chaos was on-brand for sudo room. :-)
I understand a bunch of
people learned that you can make any logic gate using only NAND gates,
That's part of it. Even more basic, that logic (which is informally used
in English and daily life) has a formal mathematical definition.
Then, that mathematical definition can be translated to hardware 1s and 0s
(high and low voltages). _You_ (dear reader) can physically wire the devices
to make that hardware do what you want.
which I assume is what the gates in Field Programmable
Gate Arrays are.
Meh. Sort of. Gates in the FPGA are more general than just NAND.
The analogy is there.
I'm hoping the next class will include some FPGA
action and people learning
how to program them?
We can stagger the exercises, and get some people started on the
actual FPGA next time. I think many of the folks who made it to the
room last Thursday could use more time with the TTL chips. I also know
several interested people couldn't make it that time.
Attached is a draft hand-out that might help some. Arik suggested to me
on Tuesday that the NAND discussion could use a gentler introduction.
If there is hardware available, like little USB based
FPGAs, i'm sure participants are willing to pay for them so that we can
start playing with them ourselves! Can you make that happen
Yes, I have three of the pico2-ice boards.
https://pico2-ice.tinyvision.ai/
Well, two of are loaned out to Maddy and David. And two still need
a Pmod connector soldered on.
We need to pick a day when people (and those boards) can make it.
I have some travel coming up, as is normal for me. I could be there
next Tuesday or maybe Sunday. Next chance would be Thursday May 28.
And also the software toolchains so
that people can get started learning about this and help teach each other
during the next meetup?
Debian Trixie:
apt-get install -y make python3 yosys nextpnr-ice40 fpga-icestorm micropython-mpremote
That should also work on recent Ubuntu, but I haven't confirmed.
I hope Arch and other Linux distros have equivalent packages by now.
I guess I should write up some kind of flier -- at least a first draft --
to cover the next steps, right?
Last night I prepared a VGA connector for hooking up
to an FPGA because
that's an exciting activity that i'd like to pursue with them, and now we
have a cool VGA monitor to play it on.
Actually writing Verilog to do something interesting would take time
and creativity. Better would be to find an existing project and
adapt it to this hardware. I bet this would be a good start:
https://www.fpga4fun.com/VGA.html
I've adapted the Music Box material on that site; the VGA shouldn't
be any harder. Our board has a 24 MHz clock, and his has a 25 MHz clock.
As he says, that's probably just fine. Our FPGA is significantly
slower than his (less likely to "make timing" at high clock rates), but
at 24 MHz it's probably OK.
- Larry