PicoEVB – Artix-7 FPGA board with M.2 interface

Please let&#x27;s kill off Vivado once and for all. Awful, massive, unintuitive proprietary software.<p>There are open source tools for programming FPGAs, and they are really great too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;playing-with-picorv32-on-the-ice40-hx8k-fpga-breakout-board-part-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;playing-with-picorv32-...</a><p>The Virtex 7 series has been reverse engineered, but we&#x27;re not quite in the situation where you can use the open source tools yet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SymbiFlow&#x2F;prjxray" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SymbiFlow&#x2F;prjxray</a>

I have a Virtex-II on a dev board that&#x27;s the size of a desktop PC&#x27;s motherboard. I found it in the trash several years ago, and couldn&#x27;t let it go to waste! I didn&#x27;t want to buy a programmer for it, so I decided to use guzuntyPi instead.<p>I&#x27;m familiar with how FPGAs work, and I did a project writing Verilog and using Xilinx chips to make a basic CPU while at university. I still think the technology is really cool.<p>The problem is, after 4 years, I still haven&#x27;t found a good use for my Virtex-II dev board. I&#x27;ll give it away for free to anyone in Taiwan, or if you pay shipping to elsewhere. You could also try to suggest fun projects (e.g. I really want HDMI input to my laptop), but the physical size of the board is just too cumbersome for my itinerant needs.

Nice. Adding this to my watch list. Another project I&#x27;ve been looking into is the snickerdoodle.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;krtkl&#x2F;snickerdoodle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;krtkl&#x2F;snickerdoodle</a>

This is by far the cheapest board to test out a PCIe FPGA design BTW. It’s so much cheaper than other PCIe boards it’s worth it to buy a used laptop on ebay with M.2 and you’d still save money :o

With how often laptops have a single wireless m.2 slot (always?) I&#x27;ve always thought it odd they chose that as the m.2 slot to use.

I feel like this would be better suited to those with NUCs or other small PC dev workstations, rather than laptops. Otherwise, wouldn&#x27;t you have IO cables hanging out of your lappy?

How useful would this be for a total beginner who wants to start messing around with and learning FPGAs? Looks super skookum.

Would it be fast enough for mining?

&gt;Artix-7<p>Prepare to have fun with setting up drivers for it on Linux.<p>Oh yeah, Artix 7 is not programmable by anything other than vevado...