Novena ICE40 FPGA Board
UPDATES:
1.June 2018: All boards have arrived at the backers. A few spare boards are still available from the production.
22.April 2018: The production has finished, we produced approximately 45 good boards, 3 defect boards and several unassembled and several defect PCBs. 4 Boards have been shipped yesterday, 15 packages were packed today and will be shipped tomorrow.
24.February 2018: We are currently in the ordering process for the first production run. All orders until today are included. Any orders from now on will be placed in a queue for a second production run. The pricing model for a second production run has not been defined yet, so the calculation will not be accurate until that point. IF YOU HAVE DECLARED INTEREST BUT NOT RECEIVED ANY EMAILS REGARDING PAYMENT AND SHIPMENT DETAILS, PLEASE CONTACT ME NOW.
This is a crowdfunding campaign for a production run of the Novena ICE40 Add-On FPGA Mezzanine board (Revision 6) with ICE40.
This is an extension board for the Novena computers
This image shows a Revision 1 board, but this campaign produces Revision 6
The original board design is from Jamie Craig, who thankfully made it available as an OpenHardware design. This production run is organized by Philipp Gühring. The boards will have official serial number provided by Jamie Craig.
Why is this FPGA board interesting for Novena owners? Because the FPGA can be programmed with Yosys and IceStorm, and those tools are running on Novena.
You can read more about the board itself here:
https://www.jamiecraig.com/novena-ice40-add-on/
https://www.jamiecraig.com/2017/03/
The price of the board strongly depends on the number of boards that will be bought, due to the high initial setup costs. The price per board varies between 75 EUR and 350 EUR. Therefore I would like to try a new crowdfunding model:
You can decide yourself for the maximum price you are willing to pay.
If the crowdfunding campaign is successful to cover the costs, we will calculate a "campaign price". Everyone who offered to pay less than the campaign price will only pay as much as he/she offered. Everyone who offered to pay more than the campaign price will only pay the campaign price. The status tab on the right side will show the estimated campaign price. If the cost structure changes unexpectedly, the final campaign price will be adapted.
The crowdfunding campaign will end on 18th February 2018 (it was originally planned for 11th February).
Remaining time:The current plan is to ship the boards in April 2018, but potential delays in purchasing the parts might delay the production.
It is not decided yet, which payment method or platform to use. Any ideas or suggestions?
Risks:
- I have not designed the board, and I do not have a working prototype myself, so I cannot guarantee any fitness for use.
- Since this campaign is currently not validating email addresses and credit cards, it could be that the people who pledge will not pay up, so that the campaign might fail, even though it seemed to succeed.