-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 8
BlackIce II Overview
BlackIce II is an OpenSource Hardware FPGA development board sporting a massive 56 PIOs and 26 GPIOs with both PMOD expansion sockets and support for Arduino shields. It has an onboard Arm Cortex M4 microcontroller and a 144 pin Ice40 FPGA with 3520 logic cells, 80Kb internal block RAM and 4Mb external SRAM.
As makers, we fell in love with IceStorm opensource Verilog toolchain back in 2015 and wanted to create a best of class independent opensource hardware development board to fully use the IceStorm FPGA toolkit. You can read some of the myStorm history and background from it's debut at OSHCAMP 2016. BlackIce is a leader in its class for opensource FPGA hardware, it's IO capabilities exceed other Ice40 dev boards. It has been refined through 3 generations and has been proven in applications and deployment spanning over 2 years, it's got some real pedigree!
BlackIce II provides maximum PMODs (peripheral modules) for building hardware add-ons and applications, way more than the competing Ice40 development kits. It is also completely OpenSource hardware making it easy for others to build on top of its design, especially when combined with the OpenSource IceStorm Verilog toolchain. Unlike some other microcontroller only development boards BlackIce II allows opensource hardware to be actually designed and synthesised using Verilog in addition to programming the onboard STM32L433 microcontroller with an Arduino compatible IDE, This combination is very powerful for tackling challenging maker projects like robotics, Retro Games, RISC V designs, SOCs, IOT, motor control and embedded applications. Further, it can be connected too and programmed entirely from a Raspberry Pi computer to create even more powerful standalone embedded Linux solutions.
- Lattice Ice40 HX4K TQFP144 FPGA with 56 PIO and 80Kb BRAM & 4Mb (256kx16) SRAM
- STM32L433 ARM Cortex M4 Microcontroller 26 GPIO 256KB Flash and 64KB RAM
- 100Mhz Oscillator (Ice40), 12Mhz crystal (STM32)
- SPI Mux control between Microcontroller, LEDs and RPi header
- SDCard SDIO connections to both Ice40 and STM32L433
- USB 1 - IceBoot for programming Ice40 with synthesised bitfiles
- USB 2 - Serial for monitoring and debugging Ice40 FPGA development
- Dip switches for input codes and/or configurations
- Push Buttons for reading inputs and resetting the board
- 4 x coloured LEDs for FPGA output indicators and fun!
- 1 x Status LED, Programmed LED & a Power LED
- 6 x Double PMODS (8 PIOs each) expansion connectors
- 2 x Single PMODS (4 PIOs each) extension connectors
- Arduino Shield Compatible Headers (plus 4 pin extension)
- RPi Header (26Pin) allows direct integration with all Raspberry Pi variants
- All hardware is Completely OpenSource and fully reusable
- OpenSource Verilog Toolchain - Clifford Wolf's IceStorm
- IceStudio and APIO support for getting started quickly
You can join us at the Mystorm forum and ask a question or talk to other BlackIce owners and participants, we would love to hear your plans and ideas for BlackIce. Getting started with BlackIce II will get you up and running, you can find some examples and basic project files to get you started in our BlackIce II repository, in addition, our official myStorm blog can keep you up to date with any current and new products