Julian Loiacono's zynqPCB, an Open-Hardware Synthesizer Powered by a Xilinx FPGA, Hits GitHub

Embedded engineer Julian Loiacono is making the source files for his zynqPCB, an open-hardware synthesizer board based on the Xilinx Zynq field-programmable gate array, generally available — and asking for input on the four-year project.

"This is the current status of my four-year project to make an FPGA-accelerated audio+video synthesizer," Loiacono explains. "I am currently taking a hiatus from this project, and have decided to make the entire PCB design available on GitHub!"

"Quite a bit of work has been put into this project. The difficult tasks of part selection and routing have been taken care of. I am still testing the functionality of the board. Only one PCB problem has been found: the SPI flash for Zynq Boot was the wrong footprint! This problem has since been fixed. I believe that together we can make this a formidable tool in the open hardware community."

While the hardware design is largely complete, pending full testing, there's still work to be done on the project: Loiacono warns that the boot loader is as-yet incomplete, and he's hoping to see a basic shell block diagram created in Vivado. There's testing of the various interfaces to be done, too, including rangefinders, accelerometers, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU), along with the HDMI video and audio output.

While Loiacono is taking a break from the project, he doesn't want to see development cease altogether; as a result, he's taken the decision to publish the schematics, design files, Gerbers, and source code files — but has not yet tied the project down to a particular open hardware license.

All files associated with the project are available now on Loiacono's GitHub repository.