Integrated Digital Lab Environment

Overview

As much as I love electronics as a hobby, my apartment is a bit too small to have a full lab power supply, scope, signal generator, and a huge bucket of development boards. Heck–my desk barely fits even just my computer! Even if I did have enough space in my apartment, I love working outside or at coffee shops around town, and I'm not sure Cafe Strada would appreciate me walking in with a crate of hardware and taking up three tables. To solve this problem, I decided to miniaturize and digitally integrate everything I need for my digital work onto a single USB powered and controlled board. 

Features

To do this, I integrated an ESP32, a large FPGA, a variable voltage source, a bit of DRAM, a micro SD card, and a bunch of on-board programmable buttons, LEDs, and variable volate GPIOs. The FPGA can be used for soft cores, SPIs, I2Cs, UARTs, USB, JTAG/SWD, or really any other high speed digital operation, including acting as a digital logic analzyer. To make the FPGA's IOs more versitile, they are powered by a variable voltage source which allows the board to digitally select a wide range of voltages in the range of 1.8V to 3.3V, making the FPGA able to both interact with more devies as a signal/protocol generator as well as sample more signals when being used as a logic analyzer. To make the board even more versitile, however, it includes 16MB of PSRAM which can be used as generic, bulk storage by the FPGA as well as a micro SD card slot which can be used both for storing bitstreams as well as bulk data for designs runnin on the FPGA. Finally, the FPGA and ESP32 are linked together over a fast QSPI bus in order to both support easy programming and debug over USB as well as provide designs running on the FPGA access to Bluetooth and WiFi.

In other words, the board has everything but the kitchen sink, and it even boots Linux!

Schematics

PCB

Boards were ordered from JLCPCB in a nice purple color:

Next Steps

Unfortunately, only 4 out of 33 parts arrived in time for the showcase due to supplier issues. Once parts arrive, I will be able to assemble and test the boards!