Colorlight 5A-75B: A dive into a popular low-cost ECP5 (FPGA) development board

I’ve used this board for an LED cube, but in general I don’t recommend it as a cheap general purpose FPGA board due to the lack of inputs, the different versions, and the uncertainty about getting access to the JTAG pins on later versions.

The Colorlight I5 is a much better choice for that. It’s also a high volume and this cheap HUB75 controller board but with a plug-in configuration so they all pins can be used as input or output.

See my old blog post about it: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2021/01/22/The-Colorlight-i5-a...

I use this one a lot: https://store.mesanet.com/index.php?route=product/product&pr...

Last month I reverse-engineered a 25 years old embedded system that controls a ground-penetrating radar, which isn't commercially available anymore. It uses ECP parallel port to talk to the radar's Rx/Tx fibre optic control unit, so I used the Mesa board to implement that part of it, hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi and put the touchscreen HMI on that.

Mostly unrelated, but I (mostly Copilot) spent some time re-authoring a software stack of HUB75 displays in our office with rotating pixel art. A previous team set them up on a overly-complex stack that relied on a bunch of services that haven't existed for years, getting them stuck in place for the last few years.

While I found the hardware pretty simple, HUB75 displays seem _very_ picky about over-volting. The setup is basically a simple controller (such as ESP32-Trinity) plugged directly into one HUB75 (potentially chained to a few more).

When running off of USB power it pulls the voltage down to ~4.7v and the image looks great. When running off our junky Amazon 5v barrel connectors the image gets all sorts of artifacting. Quite frustrating!

Anyhow, I can't recommend HUB75 displays enough. Toss some retro pixel art on there and it is such a nice little picture frame sized treat!

Also another recent FPGA thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49531525

Another low cost fpga board I've found is the EBAZ4205, which has a Zynq7010 SoC (fpga and dual core arm CPU). I got one a few years ago for 40 AUD. They were originally Bitcoin miner control boards. https://theokelo.co.ke/getting-starting-with-ebaz4205-zynq-7...

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