[chbot] Introduction (was: Re: Last two and a bit days of the garage sale....)

[Sean Anderson]

I have a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA development board
(http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-SPAR3-SK-UNI-G.htm) which
only cost me $100 US + shipping, it's $150 on the site at the moment.
This has a 200K gate FPGA.

The programming software, Xilinx Webpack can be downloaded for free
(it's 1.8 Gig so might take a while) you can atleast do VHDL
synthesis, I don't know about Verilog. There are interesting
opensource cores at www.opencores.org including RISC microprocessors.
Xilinx provide a free microprocessor core called Microblaze which can
run ordinary Linux if you choose the version with the MMU (and have a
devel board with enough RAM) otherwise you'll need uClinux. gcc
compiler support appears to be available.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:19 AM,  <follower at rancidbacon.com> wrote:
> > Good morning Phil and welcome to the Christchurch Robotics Group.
>  Thanks for the warm welcome, it's appreciated. :-)
>
>
>  > I was going to ask you for suggestions about where we could publicise
>  > our meetings to meet with like minded folks like TVIC, but I see you
>  > have beaten me to it by posting us on your site.
>  I knew that there was at least one other person who was into robotics
>  on the TVIC list and since I posted I've also had email from one
>  other.
>
>  Please feel free to pass on details about TVIC to anyone else
>  interested also--I find it difficult to know what the best way is to
>  publicise tech groups to people who I don't already know!
>
>
>  > If you are able to make it to the robotics meeting is there any
>  > chance that you could bring along some Arduino projects to show and
>  > tell?
>  Sure, if I can make it to April's meeting my plan is to bring
>  something Arduino-y along.
>
>
>  > I have an ATMega128 on my micromouse
>  > so have a vested interest in that platform.
>  Cool. As a matter of interest, where do you source your Atmel parts?
>  I'm yet to find a (local?) supplier that has both decent prices and
>  reasonable shipping for small orders.
>
>
>  > You may also be interested in the Parallax Propeller proto board:
>  I've seen reference to it but currently have too many other things to
>  distract me. :-)
>
>  On that subject, has anyone in the group had much experience with
>  FPGA/CPLD? I recently saw a presentation by a guy that's keen to get
>  software people into hardware by way of FPGA stuff. As a result I
>  looked into Verilog a little bit and made some notes here:
>  <http://code.rancidbacon.com/LearningAboutFPGA>
>
>  I'd like to find a "cheap" CPLD system to play with. (I notice a
>  Christchurch TradeMe person was selling a FPGA kit recently.)
>
>  Thanks again for the welcome, I'm looking forward to meeting with
>  people from the group--perhaps at this month's TVIC dinner before I
>  make it to April's meeting? </plug> :-)
>
>
>
>  --Phil.
>
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