A Feather-Compatible FPGA Board Running a RISC-V Core with LoRaWAN
We’ve seen a number of interesting trends this year in the microcontroller market, so it’s perhaps somewhat fitting that as the year draws to a close we have a new board ties four of the major trends together. An FPGA board running a soft RISC-V core, with onboard LoRaWAN, in a Feather form factor.
Put together by Terrill Moore, the CEO of MCCI, the prototype board is based on a Lattice Semiconductor ICE40 UltraPlus FPGA running a soft RISC-V core from the internal 128KB SRAM.
On the flip side of the board is a HopeRF RFM95W wireless module is built around the Semtech SX1276 to provide LoRa support.
The board is equipped with a Bosch BMP680 environmental sensor — a combined gas, pressure, humidity, and temperature sensor — a light and colour sensor, an accelerometer, and what looks to be a microphone. There’s also an antenna connector at one end, as well as a USB and battery jack.
The board isn’t on the market yet, and beyond Moore’s own tweets details around the board are pretty sparse. However, if you were at the RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara last week, the board was on display at the MCCI booth in the exhibit hall. If you have more details, we’d love to take a look at it, and I know I’d really like to see it go into production.
[h/t: Adafruit]