Spartan Mini

I recently finished prototyping a handheld NES console that utilizes the Spartan Mini board. I used the perfboard shield bolted to a larger perfboard to wire everything up. If you're interested in following this new project, there's a new project page here. 

I've slowly built up the NES prototype. I've since added a TFT screen, audio out via a PAM8302A Adafruit amplifier board, and an NES controller on a breadboard.

Doing some more testing on the board to make sure all systems are a go. This meant porting Brian Bennett's NES core over to the Spartan Mini :). 

I had a chance to put together a little proto shield I created for the Spartan Mini. It's fairly versatile in that it can take both soldered in through hole components, as well as a breadboard for rapid prototyping. 

I received my pcbs earlier last week and had a chance to solder everything together today and do an initial test. Looks like everything works so far! I hope to add more logs about the build and test procedures. But for now, here's a pic of the finished board: 

Using the newly created templates, I made a simple proto/perfboard shield for the Spartan Mini. It provides a 34 x 17 array of .1" separated pads to prototype circuits on. Next I'm waiting for the seed funding from the first round of the Hackaday Prize to come in to start ordering the boards and BOM for the Spartan Mini.

I uploaded a new schematic file as well as several other Spartan 6 related documents. These resources proved to be a great aid in designing the Spartan Mini board. FPGA's in general often have many documents describing configuration and requirements. These are just a few of the ones I found helpful for the Spartan 6. Enjoy!

Hello Hackers,

If you like where this project is going, please help me gain some funding to purchase boards and components by liking this project. I get $1 for every like, and that money will go directly into purchasing what I need in order to create a finished board.

Thank you!

Jon Thomasson

I added a second expansion template, this one provides access to the power pins as well as the gpio. This would be used when the daughter board was providing power to the fpga board by some means. The template can be found here and can be installed in the same way as the previous template.

The finished expansion board template will look like:

To facilitate the easy creation of shields, I created a Kicad template project with the board outline and gpio connectors in place. The project can be found here. To use it all you need to do is copy the spartanmini-shield folder into the template directory of your Kicad install. After that you can create a new template project in Kicad by going to File > New Project > New Project from Template. In the dialog box that appears select the folder that you want to contain the project and click the Select Folder button. Next you should see a screen similar to this:

Select the Spartan Mini icon from the list of templates. You should see a brief description of the board as well as an image of what the board looks like. Click OK. The template file will then be copied over to the containing folder that you specified. From there you can just open up the project and modify it to suit your needs. Here is what the blank board will look like: