Boson-Frame-Grabber

Still alive? 🪦 Yes, it’s true this project did get dropped for awhile, it’s been about 3 years since the last blog post. ...

RTL Architecture The original version of the frame grabbing PCB used an iCE40 HX8K FPGA. This turned out to be a little small for the features I wanted to add. I managed to get it to a state where it would capture images from the Boson 320, but everything was hardwired together, and not easy to alter or reuse. In order to improve module reuse and extendability a standard interface should be used. There are a few of these internal bus architectures available. I’ve decided to use wishbone, Mainly because I’ve been able to find existing wishbone modules that perform most of the major functionality of the frame grabber I’m building. ...

The new hardware for the Boson Frame Grabber will be based around the Lattice ECP5 family. Lattice make available a free IDE for this FPGA assuming you are not using a model with embedded SERDES. Since we are not, it’s perfect for our application. ...

In this part I want to talk about the firmware, or code, this device will need in order to operate as I want. ...

In part 1, I discussed the version 1 prototype I had built. Just after ordering the PCBs for that project I decided to start thinking about miniaturizing the hardware. ...