FYI ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Eric Brombaugh <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 9:14 PM Subject: [Fpga-synth] Inexpensive development environment To: "The making of synthesizers in FPGAs." <[email protected]>
Slightly OT - A few weeks back I picked up an ASUS EEE PC 900A a local big-box electronic store: 1.6GHz Intel Atom, 1GB DRAM, 4GB SDD, WiFi, Xandros Linux. $200 (!). Xandros Linux was poorly configured and had to go, but Ubuntu eee (Now called Easy Peasy) works nicely. I downloaded Xilinx ISE Webpack 10.1.03 for Linux onto a desktop machine, stripped out the documentation, Coregen, VHDL (not my language) and a lot of the unused FPGA/CPLD families. This brought the total install size down to 1.9GB - sufficiently small to fit onto a 2GB SD card which fits in an available slot on the EEE. I also grabbed a tarball of the arm-elf-gcc toolchain and installed that onto the main 4GB SDD. For board design I've installed free gEDA & PCB tools. For ARM download/debug I've got the Olimex JTAG-USB-TINY and openocd. All that's missing is an open-source FPGA download capability. I've now got a portable full-up ARM + FPGA + board design environment for a total investment of less than $250. Beat that! Eric _______________________________________________ Fpga-synth mailing list [email protected] http://rubidium.dyndns.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpga-synth -- ┌─────────────────────────┐ │ Narendra Sisodiya │ R&D Engineer │ http://narendra.techfandu.org └─────────────────────────┘ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ l...@iitd mailing list -- group http://groups.google.com/group/iitdlug -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
