17 Feb
2017
17 Feb
'17
8:01 a.m.
On 02/17/2017 01:02 AM, Jay Jaeger wrote:
First of all THANKS. I hope this works out.
?!?
It looks like you have a JTAG connector on there -
please keep that.
Of course - it's needed for initial programming.
The CPLD you had on the last board, XC9572XL is a bit
long in the tooth,
perhaps? Would you expect to use that one again, or a newer chip?
I will use it
again. It was already old when I decided to use it. It has
5V tolerant inputs.
An area with place to mount, say, a 40 pin header
(2x20) or the like, on
one edge of the board, with a set of places where one could jumper those
pins to a set of I/O pins of the CPLD/FPGA would be really cool.
As far as I just
remember, there are no substantial IO pins left.
And there is no FPGA.
A spot where one could mount an Arduino compatible
shield - again with
no actual connections, but a place where one could jumper them to some
I/O pins on the CPLD/FPGA might be really cool. (e.g., using the CPLD
to run an SPI bus connection to a shield).
No support for Arduino. Unter no
circumstanced. I really don't like
Arduino except for:
- I can get extremely cheap AVR boards ("nano") for arbitrary use.
- Young people stay on the surface of microcontroller programming. So
there is less professional competition.
In short, ways that folks could take your basic board
and make it
possible to do other things with it could increase the value of the
board enormously.
Probably. But I want to create/use/provide a simple tool that
does
exactly one thing perfectly.
You might consider KiCAD as an alternative to Eagle.
It works pretty
darned well.
Why should I? If you look at the board's size you probably see
that it
cannot be made using the free version. I own a paid Eagle 7 license. Why
should I throw that away? Started to use Eagle as a child. Have my own
libraries and footprints. Got used to the odds. And I won't use that
KiCAD thing. It smells too much like dumb Arduino folks. And I do not
want to share to much with that community.
I am an engineer and no Arduino fool... Even if KiCAD was a really great
program, it would still have the smell of the
copy-and-paste-maker-arduino-blinky-blinky-community.
Sorry for the rant but.... Arduino is just fubar..
If I would migrate to another EDA tool, I would probably migrate up to
something more elaborated than Eagle or KiCAD :-)
Kind regards
Philipp