2x1=10

I just received my Pip­istrel­lo board and it’s damn beau­ti­ful! (Unfor­tu­nate­ly the site seems to be down some­times; It looks like a DNS prob­lem to me. Just try again lat­er if the link does not work.)

On the front side, there’s the Spar­tan 6 LX45 FPGA (XC6SLX45-2CSG324), an FT2232H FTDI chip (one chan­nel wired for cus­tom use), the HDMI, USB, MicroSD and Head­phone con­nec­tors, a but­ton and six LEDs as well as a whole bunch of GPIOs.

On the bot­tom the DRAM chip can be found.

Ship­ment to Ger­many took less than a week (apart from being held back by cus­toms) and in addi­tion to a track­ing num­ber Mag­nus, the cre­ator of the Pip­istrel­lo board, sent a mail regard­ing addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion to the board, as well as sources and exam­ple code.

The board comes pre-con­fig­ured with a MicroB­laze prozes­sor run­ning a Lin­ux sys­tem that iden­ti­fies itself as Linux Pipistrello-LX45 3.6.0-11207-ga0d271c #12 Sun Dec 9 11:56:59 EST 2012 microblaze GNU/Linux. CPU and archi­tec­ture infor­ma­tion can be grabbed with cat /proc/cpuinfo, as can be seen on the fol­low­ing screen­shot of PuT­TY.

All in all a very nice expe­ri­ence.