Up squared board FPGA?

I was looking into SBC's that I could get away with running LinuxCNC on as an embedded system. Problem is I need one with a little more heft for other things going on. Came across the Up squared board which Is nice because of the dual NICs for running a Mesa eth card. I noticed it also has an Altera (Intel) FPGA built in. I believe it's configured to emulate a RPI GPIO.

I'm wondering if there is any way to re-flash something like that for use with LinuxCNC. I've seen a couple of projects that reflashed a couple of different FPGA's with modified Hostmot2 firmware in LinuxCNC and Machinekit. I'm no FPGA programmer but it certainly would be nice to use the on board FPGA to drive opto's or FETs.

UP squared datasheet

the action putting into this event woudt be a long way insted of using ready made stuff on low coast

andypugh wrote:

blazini36 wrote:

. I noticed it also has an Altera (Intel) FPGA built in. I believe it's configured to emulate a RPI GPIO.

Programming the FPGA to emulate a Mesa card would be really neat, but you alomost certainly can't use the Mesa VHDL as-is as that is for a different type of FPGA.

However, the board itself looks very promising, and there must be _some_ way to use the GPIO.

Well there's a Pluto-P driver for that board which seems to use an Altera Quartus.
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.4/html/drivers_pluto_p.html

Then There's a modified HM2 for several FPGA's in Machinekit, but nothing specifically for the Altera Max10
github.com/machinekit/mksocfpga

Mesa generally uses a Spartan 6 right? Like I said, I'm not the guy to do it but I'd certainly test it. I plan on picking one of these SOCs up soon. From what I hear the GPIO in it's current form has high latency, probably because of something it's doing to emuplate the RPI that the 40 Pin header is set to mimic. There's also A 60 pin connector under the board for FPGA GPIO. I'm not up to snuff on RPIs so I'm not really sure what the FPGA can do in its current form but seems like it could do much more if fully broken out.

MachineKits VHDL should work on any Altera FPGA, but the FPGA on the Up Squared board is much too small for HM2 (only 125 LEs)

It should work fine for GPIO however (or work for HM2 if they release a Up Squared board with Larger capacity FPGA installed)

From what I'm reading it has a 10M02 FPGA with 125 Logic Array Blocks and 2000 Logic Elements. I'm guessing what Altera calls a logic element is = xylinx's logic cell. in which case the Spartan6 in a 7i96 has about 9000.

Is it too small to even get HM2 on there? Mesa cards, for perfectly good reason always have a bunch of GPIO that I don't use. If I could get a few stepgens and a reasonable amount of I/O on it (custom bitfile?) for a purpose built machine I could probably whip up a PCB to break it all out.

andypugh wrote:

blazini36 wrote:

. I noticed it also has an Altera (Intel) FPGA built in. I believe it's configured to emulate a RPI GPIO.

However, the board itself looks very promising, and there must be _some_ way to use the GPIO.

You might also want to look at the UDOO, which is similar but with an Arduino-compatible pinout:
www.mouser.co.uk/new/udoo/udoo-x86/

I've been all over the SBC scene waiting for something with some juice to pop up. I've Been looking at the Udoo boards as well but at $270 for the x86 Ultra I can't really justify it over building a MITX PC and plugging in a MESA card. which is what I currently do with an AMD APU.

The main reason I like the UP2 is that it has dual NICs if I do stick with a Mesa eth card. I'm not sure how the microprocessor for the Arduino compatible GPIO interfaces the rest of the board, It's my understanding that an actual Arduino can't run in real-time. Is that possible with a board like this and it's GPIO?

Yeah their terminology is all different. So the 10M02 has 2000 4-LUTs
This is pretty small (about 1/2 the size of our oldest Spartan2 based cards)
but could fit a couple stepgens and encoder counters etc depending
on the complexity of the host interface