The Butterfly Uno adds 5V tolerance to all I/O which allows the addition of an Arduino footprint. The Arduino footprint allows the Butterfly Uno to use Arduino shields or to act as a shield for the Arduino. When acting as an Arduino shield the SPI flash can be programmed by the Arduino.
The Butterfly One and Butterfly Uno prototypes have both been submitted for manufacturing.
Any price estimations on Butterfly Uno and Butterfly One?
When will they be available?
What FPGAs will it be sold with? 100? 250? 500?
BTW, both project pages incorrectly list the Spartan XC3S1000E as pinout compatible, when in fact it's the XC3S100E
@udif
Thank you for pointing out the XC3S1000E typo! I was completely oblivious to the mistake, it is indeed the XC3S100E.
I'm trying to get the Butterfly Uno priced at $35 dollars and the Butterfly One priced at $45, both using the XC3S250E chip to start.
The XC3S250E chip will be available to hopefully be followed with the 500 as I can work it out with Seeed Studio. The 100 will only be made available if there is an actual application for such a small chip.
I'm also working on an FT2232 addon for the Butterfly Uno for programming it. The goal is to allow it to be programmed by the addon or with an Arduino.
The Butterfly Uno is being manufactured by Seeed Studio right now and is the primary focus. If everything tests out well then it could be available in a month. If there are problems then I will work on making the Butterfly One available since it is based on a proven design. Either way I hope to have one of these boards available at Seeed in 1-2 months.
Personally I'm interested in boards with both an FPGA and some memory on them (SRAM or DRAM).
You can't really make too many interesting projects without external memories.
You have here 3 boards that are very similar:
OpenBench Logic sniffer
Butterfly One
Butterfly Uno
All of those basically contain an FPGA with minimal support logic.
An FT2232 addon also looks like a waste of time, at least for me, with projects like the Bus Pirate already available. If you want to go lower cost, Sparkfun already has a basic FTDI breakout board, which might also could be used to bit-bang a few I/O lines, enough to configure an FPGA.
Other boards at this price range includes the Altera/Hitex BeMicro, which for $49 gives you USB interface for programming, some memory an an EP3C15, which seems pretty large to me.
Unfortunately, it won't be in stock until mid-april, and Arrow aren't very cost effective for small international orders.
Another one is from Avnet:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/2009/08/24/49-fpga-development-board/
This one has an XC3S400A and a Cypress PSoc chip for $49, but like Arrow, the overhead for a single unit international order is high.
Generally, I like ordering from places like Seeed and Sparkfun because they are oriented towards hobbyists like me, with cheap products and cheap shipping rates.
Personally, I would go for a XC3S500E device and not a XC3S250E since the $7-$8 difference in the price of the part is pretty small compared with the total board cost.
As for memory, maybe an SODIMM socket would have been a good solution to allow optional memory, yet keep the cost increase at minimum, but when using a 100 pin FPGA this wastes too many I/Os. A possible solution is to connect it to a 8 or 16 bit data bus and rely on separate CAS lines to activate each component separately.
I think it is possible to have a 16 bit wide SODIMM interface with 42 I/O lines.
I just realized that the OpenBench Logic Sniffer is made by dangerous prototypes, not you…
I got mixed up because they all end being sold by Seeed.
Actually the OpenBench Logic Sniffer is a joint project that both Ian at Dangerous Prototypes and I have done together. I did the FPGA side and Ian did the micro side.
Jack.
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