Numato Opsis is a powerful new field-programmable gate array (FPGA) video platform for videographers and visual artists, and is now crowdfunding on Crowd Supply. The open source Opsis board is designed to enable complete control over high speed video, for everything from real-time conference capturing solutions, to experimental visual art and even general FPGA-based video research.

As a collaboration between the TimVideos.us live event streaming project and FPGA development board manufacturer Numato Lab, it is the ideal device for the HDMI2USB.tv video capturing firmware, which was inspired by Bunnie Huang's NeTV project to tackle the idea of creating open capture hardware and allows for “fool proof” automated conference/event recording systems.

Because the board includes the high-speed Xilinx Spartan 6, it has the ability to hold large designs and makes for a state-of-the-art FPGA development platform. It is also a powerful solution for video-based art or live video effects such as Video DJing, which carries on M-Labs' vision of the original Milkymist platform for visual effects. The Opsis is flexible and powerful enough to have a large number of use cases, many of which have yet to be considered.

Specifications and Feature Highlights:

• Four high speed transceivers (known as GTP transceivers in Xilinx's documentation) capable of running up to 3.2 Gb/s per transceiver
• Four independent HDMI ports (720p or 1024x768, two in, two out) which are fully user controllable (e.g. virtual disconnect and remote control)
• 12Gbit/s aggregate bandwidth
• DisplayPort in and out with 12Gbit/s (compatible with DP++)
• High speed communication with Gigabit Ethernet (verified at 117 Megabytes/second).
• High speed communication with USB 2.0 (verified at 40 Megabytes/second)
• Large Spartan 6 FPGA (S6LX45T) with 256 Mbytes DDR3 memory

• Large, high speed expansion interface, with 19 differential pairs broken out to a PCI-Express connector

“Over the past four years building the TimVideos.us project, we found ourselves limited by proprietary video solutions and unable to do everything we wanted,” said Tim Ansell, co-creator of the Numato Opsis. “As an open source contributor since 1999, I saw the opportunity to build a flexible, fully controllable open source solution that could eliminate the 10 minutes at the start of every talk where the presenter fiddles with their laptop. What we’ve ended up with is an FPGA that can do that, and so much more. ”

Numato Opsis is crowdfunding its first production run on Crowd Supply, the collaborative commerce platform for open hardware, with a minimum goal of $8725 US. Because of the close partnership with its manufacturer, Numato, the scheduled ship date of December 2015 has little risk for delay.

Complete details about Numato Opsis area available on the crowdfunding page, or view the developer documentation here or on GitHub. The complete hardware schematics and design files can also be found on GitHub.