#Alchitry

poleguy looking for lost toolspoleguy
2025-11-11

I plugged it in to USB... it powered on.
I went to plug in the second USB and as the metal made contact it suddenly powered off...

I saw no magic smoke.

It sure looks dead. I hope it's not a design flaw... because I just ordered two replacements.

forum.alchitry.com/t/regulator

Order for two replacement boards at $249.99 each.
poleguy looking for lost toolspoleguy
2025-10-20

Pt board has a Br Break out board. It's all differentially routed. But wow, not an exemplar break-out for 6+GHz capable pairs. Even if it were for 10MHz signals, that breakout pattern is terrible. Swiss cheeze.

I guess for only fifteen bucks it's good enough, but yeah, maybe for the next spin you could hook up more than one ground pin? At least the pinout on the FPGA board seems to have a good number of ground pins.

But now I should inspect the Pt layout closely.

More in alt.

Connector with lots of differential pairs with all of the interspersed grounds not connected except for one at the very end, because the differential vias block the top layer copper.

It's also very tight along the edge of the board. This is a classic routing problem for FPGA board connectors. To allow for a a proper fan-out near the board edge means the board must grow or the layer count must go way up. Neither are awesome. 

https://shop.alchitry.com/collections/products

In general I'm pretty happy with this FPGA board and accessories. But this was a disappointment.

I'm going to solder in a pigtail for an SMA cable, but the top ground is under solder mask. I would prefer to have areas of exposed ground all around to solder to without scraping. No biggie.
poleguy looking for lost toolspoleguy
2025-10-06

@PaulaMaddox I didn't actually post to the forums yet, but I got it working. I had the FT600 board underneath the FPGA board and it did not work. I then tried it with the FT600 board on the top (because I wanted to probe it) and then it suddenly worked with the loopback test.

Great success for day one!

It's not clear what the problem with in the other configuration, but that can wait till another day.

Paula MaddoxPaulaMaddox
2025-06-11

YAY, built with a VERY simple memory interface which I've connected to LEDs on my board
I can now send data via memory to my own custom blocks (I think).

Next step is to figure out the memory mapping proper.

Screen shot showing the console of the neorv32, Vivado block diagram, make window and Alchitry loaderPhoto of the board mid count.
2024-04-03

#Retroputer #FPGA Update

Bought a 2.4" TFT ILI9341 from @adafruit and connected it up via 4-line SPI using #Alchitry Br (breakout board). I added an I/O device so the CPU can send D/C select bits and data bytes using a FIFO buffer.

After a bit of a false start (involved adapting Adafruit's init sequence and experimentation), we have something coherent on the screen!

Super slow to fill the screen w/ #BASIC (using OUT commands), but validates that my understanding mostly matches reality. Woot!

Garbled pixels on the display. This is what happens when you don’t correctly control D/C & CS lines and drop the last byte of your transmission… lots of garbled gunk on the screen!Display showing a repeating grid of a 64x64 color gradient showing blue, red, and green.This shows a repeating 64x64 grid with a blue/red/green gradient and an intricate pattern derived from ((x*y) mod 64).

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