In its first venture into crowd funding the company Valent F(x), are seeking pledges for its LOGi FPGA development boards on Kickstarter that should make both the Beaglebone Black and Raspberry Pi communities happy. The Raspberry Pi version of the board is the LOGi-Pi while the BeagleBone Black is called the LOGi-Bone. The two boards offer roughly the same capabilities:

  • FPGA — Xilinx Spartan-6 LX9 (XC6SLX9-3TQG144C); TQFP144 package.
  • Memory — 256 MB SDRAM
  • ARM support:
    • LOGi-Bone — connects with (optimized) BeagleBone Black (1 GHz Cortex-A8 TI Sitara AM3359) or original BeagleBone White (720 MHz Sitara AM3358)
    • LOGi-Pi — connects with Raspberry Pi (700 MHz ARM11 Broadcom BCM2835)
  • ARM interconnect:
    • LOGi-Bone — SPI, I2C and GPMC
    • LOGi-Pi — SPI, I2C, UART and GPIO/PRGM
  • Arduino expansion:
    • 1x Arduino Due header for Arduino shield plug-in
    • Optional GPMC, SPI or I2C access from BeagleBone (LOGi-Bone)
    • Optional I2C, SPI from Rasperry Pi (LOGi-Pi)
  • Pmod expansion — 2x Digilent Pmod ports for 59+ modules including LOGi-Cam and LOGi-Edu
  • Display — 10x length tuned LVDS pairs
  • Storage — 1x SATA x1 connector
  • Other I/O:
    • 2x pushbuttons
    • 2x DIP switches
    • 32x FPGA I/Os (via Pmod and Arduino connectors)

The boards are not yet available but if you can’t wait to start your FPGA project take a look at the versatile Elektor FPGA board which also hosts a Xilinx Spartan gate array and can be ordered fully assembled and tested. Together with the supporting explanatory articles and the latest expansion board it will get you up and running in no time.