Awesome board, looks like something I'd love to play with.
But: Currently I again and again hear things like this as a critic against Arduino, Sparkcore etc:
The current emphasis on highly integrated, dumbed down hobbyist/educational microcontrollers is beginning to bug me.
I am excited that this stuff is becoming accessible now! I loved that Lego Mindstorms brought basic automation programming into a lot of schools, I love that Arduino makes it possible for artists without a programming background to create interactive art etc.pp.
While the 1337-factor might be lower than implementing your own CPU on an FPGA and then using it to control the temperature of your coffee brewer I believe that making this stuff easier to learn can only benefit us.
(To the author: I know you probably don't mean it that way, I just often hear something along the lines of "These things are getting too easy, it's not really geeky!")
I think the criticism is that Arduino is "softwareized hardware". The way you build up an Arduino-system is by fitting pre-engineered modules together in a well-defined general purpose framework.
I'll venture a guess that the average Arduino project is several orders of magnitude more expensive and more complex than a purpose-build non-software electronics project. It's just that the complexity is hidden away in extremely well tested, well supported and well understood chips (such as the 8086 and the Atmel chips in Arduinos) and while $20 is orders of magnitude more than a few cents, it's still just $20.
Software people lament the unhackability of modern computers because they are highly integrated and requires a deep stack of drivers and operating systems to every turn on -- an Arduino board probably represents roughly the same loss of control to a hardware guy who knows how to do cool things with an oscillator and a couple of transistors.
Also, Arduino is cool even when you know what's happening below the abstraction.
You get a very cheap fully-integrated fully-tested small-form-factor board with SMD components factory-soldered in, a flashed bootloader and great support (I got an Arduino Due with a fried DAC replaced). All that with an easy-to-use IDE with some cool libraries, where you can still use the low level stuff if you need to. It's also better for a much faster prototyping before you develop your final product.
So it's the best for beginners (as you said, it lowers the barrier of entry for EE) and also useful for electronics-savvy people. Is that bad? I don't think so.
And in Arduino's case, it's open hardware/source if you want to do it yourself!
Same goes for Raspberry Pi, which I don't even know if I could do myself (are Broadcom SoC's datasheets even publicly available without an NDA?)
> are Broadcom SoC's datasheets even publicly available without an NDA?
The SoC the RasPi uses, at least, has its datasheets available on Rasperry Pi's website. However, if you want to run anything but Linux on it, good luck dealing with its arcane boot sequence.
Those are only a tiny part of what Broadcom actually has in terms of documentation for the SoC.
Look at the full set of documentation for a modern ARM SoC that does have it available (e.g. TI's Sitara series - which still doesn't have the GPU docs included) and you'll see that it is several thousand pages long.
Especially the "streamlined" programming, with the wealth of existing modules for all kind of peripherals make it incredibly easy to prototype most things. In that regard, it's also a very good replacement for the "parallel printer port" to which most hobbyists used to attach their simple peripherals in the old days.
And for the crowd that needs everything a little "less dumbed down", you get eval-boards for selected 8- and 32bit MCUs for so little money... on which then you can run your handcrafted assembler code to your heart's content.
Now, if we could only get the FPGA world away from their ugly proprietary synthesis tools...
>>These things are getting to easy, it's not really geeky!
In defense of these opinions, we need at-least somebody in the next generation to understand how the lowest level of technology works. I am told that everybody in my field built a radio communication system in high-school, now its a project for a senior level class.
The amount of educational material on the Internet has increased vastly, but looking at all the misconceptions and "not even wrong" stuff floating around, I'm not so convinced this is a good thing. Quantity is not quality.
I remember a math professor I had relating a discussion he had with another professor about whether to make the students memorize trigonometry rules. The proponent had no comeback for: "Should students be taught to make their own lightbulb before they do their homework at night?"
That is funny, since I don't think many maths instructors would agree with giving students calculators and starting with calculus in lieu of teaching them arithmetic first - which is similar to what beginning programmers are being taught these days.
If you learn how to implement a PIC you've basically learned how to implement all PICs, so those giant parametric charts of on board device tradeoffs are all open to you. Need 3 CANBUS and 12 bit A/D, just swap a chip. Also lets be realistic, some families are weirder than others and there are always gotchas but if you can make a 68hc11 work you can make a AVR work or any other microcontroller ever made in the past or future.
Or you can buy someone elses product and play within that timid little silo and never, ever, think of expanding outside that rigid narrow little silo, always suffering under someone elses tradeoff decisions. And if all you ever do is blink a LED you'll never know the difference.
Its like the difference between learning to be a carpenter who can make any shape of wood out of any species of wood and any wood finish, although maybe its a lot of work and takes awhile and the end result of the first hundred tries is best utilized as woodstove fuel, vs playing with a purchased bucket of lincoln logs and deluding yourself that you're now a woodworker just like the old time woodworkers, because, hey, I'm a maker, making wood stuff! "Hey look, I made a cabin using lincoln logs! A whole cabin in less time than old time apprentices took to learn how to nail together a little wooden box. Isn't progress great?"
To be fair, I think there is a place for stuff like the Arduino, RPi, &c.; for example, I've got a couple of projects prototyped on my breadboard Pi right now, before I reimplement them on an MSP430 as I2C-connected peripherals, and even that's an intermediate step on the road to my (very eventual) ultimate goal of making them operable via USB.
Now, as fancy as all that sounds, I'm basically a software guy who can just about use a soldering iron without putting himself in the hospital. If I had to start at the end, implementing a USB interface I as yet know next to nothing about, it'd be a very long time, if ever, before I managed to achieve anything.
If I had to start in the middle, with a simple-minded little 16-bit MCU and an I2C interface, I'd have almost as hard a time, not least because I'd have to find some way to bridge the devices I'm building and the software that drives them. (Off the top, I guess I could dig up an old USB-to-parallel adapter somewhere, then bit-bang I2C on the data lines or something, but I wouldn't be delighted at having to go so far out of my way.)
Being able to start with an RPi, where I can address GPIO pins with `cat` and `echo`, and validate my idea before I start working my way up the complexity curve, is a great aid to actually being able to accomplish something. If I had EE training, that'd be one thing, of course, but I am, as mentioned, a software guy, picking up a new hobby in my spare time. Not having to learn everything all at once makes that worlds easier to achieve.
And, hey, if there are people who figure the answer to everything hardware is "buy an Arduino and some shields", is that even necessarily so bad? They're not looking to get into electrical engineering work, or at least I hope they're not; they're just excited to be able to do things they couldn't do before, because the necessary degree of complexity was beyond their capabilities. Isn't that more or less the whole point of technology?
My only complaint are when things are productized with an Arduino or equivalent shoved into them when the cost could be drastically cut by using a lower powered and cheaper set of parts.
I went to a maker fair last year - one maker's club was showing off their arduino-powered... doorbell. And no, it wasn't doing anything fancy like connectivity, they built it for the workshop front door.
Speaking as someone who once implemented PWM brightness control for keyboard LEDs via a hacked copy of xset(1), it's hard for me to judge anyone on the basis of overengineering, and yet...
Long ago I wrote a COFF linker so that I could use Turbo-C for x86 embedded projects (first one was a power line monitor made from wire-wrapped x88). Recently put it in github if anyone is interested: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/lang/ali...
I tried to sell this through ads in Midnight Engineering, but it didn't work out.
This is really cool. Initially from the photo I thought it was just a big FPGA emulating an 8086, but then I saw the chunky DIP chips on the other end.
The TP3465 SPI chip mentioned sounds useful — I've been building a single-board 6502 which is CPU bit-banging SPI at 1 MHz, and takes about a minute to fill a small 16-bit color screen. I've wanted to offload that to an SPI chip, but hadn't found any. The downside; the TP3465 chips are about $11 each on Mouser, and don't come in hand-solder-friendly packages.
I mostly came here to write that I'm puzzled by “reasons I shouldn’t need to explain” here, though:
> In terms of disclosure of what is inside this CPLD – [...] Its final design is now almost entirely VHDL. If there’s sufficient interest I’ll do a good diagram of it at some point, but for reasons I shouldn’t need to explain, I won’t be providing the full source for it just yet.
I could only guess, from most to least likely; (a) it contains proprietary IP that is being used without a license, (b) he considers it too messy to release, (c) he just doesn't want to, or (c) he wants to retain the ability to license his creation.
Incredibly awesome concept for a board, considering the wide spelled use of this processor, I can only imagine the sheer number of projects that could result if this thing ever sees mass production.
http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/CP80C86-2Z/CP80C86-...
As far as "DIY x86 computers" are concerned I think the newest CPU someone has managed to use in one is a 386/486:
http://www.s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/80386%20Boa...