Icepi Zero is an open source FPGA board in a Raspberry Pi Zero-sized form factor

Nearly a decade ago, Raspberry Pi showed that it's possible to cram a fully functional computer into a tiny package that's about the size of a stick of chewing gum or about the size of a USB flash drive. In time since the first Raspberry Pi Zero launched we've seen a bunch of updates as well as third-party boards with a similar design but different hardware.

But the Icepi Zero stands out for a few reasons. The biggest is that instead of an ARM or RISC-V based processor, it's powered by a Lattice ECP5 FPGA, which means users can basically pick their own processor by providing instructions to the FPGA on how to function.

A few other things that make this little board unusual? The designs are completely open source, and the developer is just 16 years old, and has been working with FPGAs for at least a few years. In fact, when folks on reddit asked about plans for the board, developer cyao12 said "I'm going to try to put the old cpu I made in verilog when I was 13 on it!"

The Icepi Zero features an FPGA with 24 thousand LUTs (Lookup Tables) and 112 KiB of RAM, as well as 256Mbit of 166 MHz SDRAM, 128Mbit of flash storage, a microSD card reader, three USB Type-C ports, a mini GPDI connector (basically an unlicensed HDMI port) and a few other odds and ends including 4 LED lights, a button, a 40 MHz external oscillator, and an onboard USB to JTAG and UART converter.

Since the design is open source, anyone could theoretically build their own… but that would require manufacturing a printed circuit board and attaching some off-the-shelf components including chips, ports, and LEDs. But cyao12 has applied to Crowd Supply to set up a crowdfunding campaign for folks that would prefer to pay for a fully preassembled version of the board.

There's no word on if or when that will happen though, or how much the board will cost – cyao12 says it should be possible to bulk manufacture the boards for around $40 or $50, but the crowdfunding price might be a bit higher than that to cover unanticipated costs.

via Hacker News

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