Fomu An FPGA board that fits inside your USB port

(crowdsupply.com)

20 points | by Bluestein 3 days ago ago

4 comments

  • amelius an hour ago

    But is it fast enough to do USB 3?

    If so, here's a nice and simple project idea: that board with two USB connectors and connect it to the two ends of the same cable; you send a pseudorandom bitstream down one end and verify if it comes out correctly at the other end and report the bit error rate (USB cable tester)

    • jedbrooke 43 minutes ago

      looks like it only has the physical connections for USB 2. Fun fact about usb 3, it’s really a completely separate physical standard from usb 2, just designed in such a way that a single port can have BOTH usb 2.0 and 3.0 connectors in it at the same time. In theory this would allow for devices to use the full bandwidth of 3.0 + the full bandwidth of 2.0, but as far as I know no device does that.

  • kej 38 minutes ago

    Apparently there is a newer Qomu device that combines the FPGA and an MCU: https://www.crowdsupply.com/quicklogic/qomu

  • jauntywundrkind an hour ago

    Its a cool board! Second submission on it ~7 years ago got a tiny bit of traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488397

    There's a fun/interesting lesson on some creative routing for the ice40 FPGA FPGA here. Which I re-stumbled into just last week by happenstance. https://danielmangum.com/posts/spi-routing-ice40-fpga/

    One of the makers Tim @mithro Ansell is pretty great. A bit quieter on the social media these days, but https://bsky.app/profile/mith.ro