$30: Tang Nano 20K FPGA board
Time to go back to making potato CPUs with FPGAs. Last time around I've screwed around with a Nano 9K, which was awesome and just fit a 6502 with 48K RAM and a few perifs.
The Nano 20K, with the same form factor (the size of my thumb but flatter), is even better for $10 more. It is roughly twice the speed, has 96KB blockram, 64Mb SDRAM and 48 DSP units.
And it still has tons of IO pins, HDMI, LCD, USB, audio and microSD connectors. 7 LEDs (including an RGB one), and 3 buttons.
I am really psyched to get it to do potato stuff (for some reason, lately when asked what I do I just tell people I write code on potatos... Very few people bother to continue that conversation)
So far managed to get the LED to cycle colors (after totally forgetting how to build and especially flash FPGAs). Need to upgrade the Chinese IDE...
2025-02-07 · 1 year ago · 👍 astio
2 Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · 2025-02-08 at 12:56:
Now you have me wondering if it's possible to turn a potato into a transistor. While a whole CPU isn't in the cards, maybe a few logic gates for some basic arithmetic is.
🚀 stack [OP/mod] · 2025-02-08 at 14:26:
@darkghost, what a perfect Make Magazine article!
BTW, a few years back, Make guideline for writers was "Write an article, then write a 300 word review of it, and submit it. Discard the article".
I was always amazed how Make managed to provide zero information...