I’ve used this board for an LED cube, but in general I don’t recommend it as a cheap general purpose FPGA board due to the lack of inputs, the different versions, and the uncertainty about getting access to the JTAG pins on later versions.<p>The Colorlight I5 is a much better choice for that. It’s also a high volume and this cheap HUB75 controller board but with a plug-in configuration so they all pins can be used as input or output.<p>See my old blog post about it: <a href="https://tomverbeure.github.io/2021/01/22/The-Colorlight-i5-as-FPGA-development-board.html" rel="nofollow">https://tomverbeure.github.io/2021/01/22/The-Colorlight-i5-a...</a>
Mostly unrelated, but I (mostly Copilot) spent some time re-authoring a software stack of HUB75 displays in our office with rotating pixel art. A previous team set them up on a overly-complex stack that relied on a bunch of services that haven't existed for years, getting them stuck in place for the last few years.<p>While I found the hardware pretty simple, HUB75 displays seem _very_ picky about over-volting. The setup is basically a simple controller (such as ESP32-Trinity) plugged directly into one HUB75 (potentially chained to a few more).<p>When running off of USB power it pulls the voltage down to ~4.7v and the image looks great. When running off our junky Amazon 5v barrel connectors the image gets all sorts of artifacting. Quite frustrating!<p>Anyhow, I can't recommend HUB75 displays enough. Toss some retro pixel art on there and it is such a nice little picture frame sized treat!
I use this one a lot: <a href="https://store.mesanet.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=338" rel="nofollow">https://store.mesanet.com/index.php?route=product/product&pr...</a><p>Last month I reverse-engineered a 25 years old embedded system that controls a ground-penetrating radar, which isn't commercially available anymore. It uses ECP parallel port to talk to the radar's Rx/Tx fibre optic control unit, so I used the Mesa board to implement that part of it, hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi and put the touchscreen HMI on that.
Another low cost fpga board I've found is the EBAZ4205, which has a Zynq7010 SoC (fpga and dual core arm CPU). I got one a few years ago for 40 AUD. They were originally Bitcoin miner control boards. <a href="https://theokelo.co.ke/getting-starting-with-ebaz4205-zynq-7000/" rel="nofollow">https://theokelo.co.ke/getting-starting-with-ebaz4205-zynq-7...</a>
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