Enjoy Digital Is Giving Away 20 SQRL Acorn FPGA Boards — to Grow an Open-Hardware Ecosystem
Tiny former-Bitcoin-mining FPGA boards host an entire Linux-capable RISC-V implementation — with room spare for your own logic.
Open source computing expert Enjoy Digital is offering free ultra-compact M.2 FPGA-based accelerator boards, capable of acting as a Linux-capable RISC-V computer, to anyone willing to help with developing the devices and their ecosystem.
Enjoy Digital has been working on building a fully open source development board for RISC-V projects based around the SQRL Acorn, a company PCI Express M.2 FPGA board originally built to accelerate Bitcoin mining. The rising difficulty of mining the cryptocurrency coupled with the launch of more powerful application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) hardware, though, means they're all-but useless for their intended purpose - making them ideal for upcycling into something new.
The LiteX-Acorn-Baseboard is the first Linux-capable RISC-V-based open-hardware RISC-V development board to be built around the Acorn, but Enjoy Digital doesn't want to be alone: It's offering developers one of 20 Acorn boards free of charge, for installation into any computer with a PCIe M.2 slot available — and for use as either a second RISC-V-based system or for hosting an FPGA-based acceleration core.
"Have a free PCIe-M2 slot in your Linux computer? Why not put a 100 per cent open RISC-V-Linux computer in it or create your own FPGA based accelerator - without any JTAG/UART cable," Enjoy Digital writes of its offer. "20 Acorn boards to give away for developers willing to contribute/extend this!"
"Funny thing: The LiteUART Linux driver from Antmicro is used on both side for UART communication: By the VexRiscv SoC running Linux and by the Host to create the virtual UART over PCIe. This last missing piece has just been added by Ilia S."
The key appeal to the Acorn, when running Enjoy Digital's code, is that it's completely open source — from the LiteX system-on-chip with its RISC-V cores to the DDR3 and PCI Express interfaces. There's room left, too, for a developer to implement their own logic alongside the Linux-capable RISC-V SoC.
Enjoy Digital is currently taking applications for the free board on Twitter, with instructions for building the software for the Acorn available on GitHub.
