MiSTer host hardware candidate: 110k LE Cyclone V board for ~$30 (Chameleon96)

[PoV]

So I just want to bring your attention to an FPGA board that might make an excellent alternative to the DE-10 Nano, and at the time of this writing it's 1/4th the price! IMPORTANT: MiSTer WILL NOT run on this board today! Please don't buy-up every board in order to resell them! Developers need to own and actually support this board before it'll do anything useful, and there are some potentially big hurdles to overcome!

The board in question is the Chameleon96 from 96boards.

https://www.96boards.org/product/chameleon96/

chameleon2.jpg (294.59 KiB) Viewed 4591 times

It features a similar spec SOC as the DE-10 Nano (110k LE Cyclone V), the same CPU and half the RAM (512 MB). It has HDMI, a USB OTG port, 2x USB host ports (potentially saving you from needing a hub), WiFi networking, Micro SD-Card slot, and a variety of expansion connectors. It also comes with a power adapter, UART cable, Micro USB cable, and a 16 GB MicroSD card with adapter.

chameleon-accessories.jpg (304.32 KiB) Viewed 4591 times

I stumbled across a reply from Sorgelig regarding the board, so he's definitely aware of it, but he brings up potential issues getting SDRAM working (compatible low voltage memory chips only seem to come in BGA packages, oof).

https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.p ... c7#p338868

So again, this is going to take some work if it ever works at all! Please be cool and don't buy them all.

Arrow.com has two listings for the boards.

This full price listing ($184.71): https://www.arrow.com/en/products/chame ... ovtech-inc

And the low price listing ($31.34): https://www.arrow.com/en/products/chame ... ovtech-inc

The listings are basically identical. They even have the same broken images.

I bought the cheap one to make sure I wasn't crazy, padded my order to $50 for free shipping, and yep, it's a Chameleon96 for ~$31 (shown above).

Chances are good that this is a pricing mistake, but I would love to be wrong. If we could somehow get a MiSTer compatible setup with all cores for under $100 (i.e. this plus a custom SDRAM board) that would be bonkers!

[andrezheng]

I just ordered two Chameleon96 boards. Let's wait and to see what I am going to get.

[andrezheng]

Just checked the schematic, this 96 board is useless for Mister fpga since all the IOs extended to the connectors are HPS IOs. Not possible to put SDRAM addon on this board.

[noel]

Chances are good that this is a pricing mistake, but I would love to be wrong. If we could somehow get a MiSTer compatible setup with all cores for under $100 (i.e. this plus a custom SDRAM board) that would be bonkers!

31$ is a very low price for this kind of dev board. There is a good chance that this evaluation board is sold well below its real price to tempt companies and developers to use this platform rather than going to the competition.

Just checked the schematic, this 96 board is useless for Mister fpga since all the IOs extended to the connectors are HPS IOs. Not possible to put SDRAM addon on this board.

Some cores don't need the SDRAM board (TurboGrafx16, Genesis, ...). Even if very few cores can run on it, it is still interesting for the price it costs.

[Newsdee]

I lists a "high speed" connector, but I guess it's not fast enough for SDRAM?

[PoV]

I lists a "high speed" connector, but I guess it's not fast enough for SDRAM?

I've only started looking in to it, but I think the complaint is that the GPIO pins on the connector are routed to the pins connected to the ARM CPU half (HPS) and not to the pins directly connected to the FPGA half of the chip. This assumes the chip has separate pins for the CPU and the FPGA. I did see numerous mentions of banking throughout the schematic doc, and I haven't looked at the SOC's data sheet, so I don't know how pins are allocated.

[PoV]

Ah shoot, somebody shared the link with CNX Software. Sorry! I tried to give MiSTer devs a head start on these. Comparing stock levels, about 50 boards were purchased since sharing. I really hope some active developers managed to get their hands on one.

EDIT: And gone.

[Sorgelig]

For MiSTer it's useless. As pointed in first post i'm pretty aware of this board. The original price was the same as DE10-nano ~$130.
$31 is a clearance sale. Once gone - it's gone forever. There is no point to target for this board, although it can be good for private builds of some cores. Board is very limited in terms of GPIOs. Not enough signals for SDRAM. Half of DDR3 memory will shrink available RAM for both linux and FPGA. Also DDR3 is 16bit instead of 32bits, so it's also much slower. Could be a good board (wifi+bt + normal USB connectors) but designer has doomed it.

If you are just user, not core developer and bought this board then you've bought a useless board