Mesa and Efinix FPGAs

PCW wrote:

What do you think of pluggable spring retention connectors vs screws?

I prefer (high quality) spring retention terminal blocks in general: they are faster to use and do not come loose with time or vibration. But like others I would rate the possibility to probe the signal higher than the small increase in convenience over screws. Many DIN mounted, spring loaded terminal blocks have specific means to probe the signal though (e.g. a hole for a probe tip). Not sure about PCB mounted ones?

A DIN version with connectors on the sides sounds interesting. I find the space for cables rather cramped on my 7i77. If it was possible to place the connectors not on the edge but a bit receded, so that there is a few cm of space for e.g. shrink tubed shield/outer sheath before the cable enters the cable duct, that would be good.

(All this said I'm not exactly a big buyer of Mesa cards so I won't be very disappointed either way. )

PCW post=253755 userid=481Still debating whether to make a mechanical equivalent or a DIN tray mounted card with connectors on the periphery

I agree with Tommylight's statement. Din rail . And definitely stay with screw terminals. they hold
wires with ferrules far better then spring terminals . That and they just look more "Industrial".
 

I can't imagine how you could bit that many terminals on the periphery of the card, presumably horizontal unless they were stacked. Stacked connectors bring up the whole access for probing issue.

Why would anyone want the cards in a DIN tray form factor? In the pic I posted is a 7i96 mounted on DIN clips. Nice thing about those is that I don't -have- to use them if I'm tight on space and just want to mount the card on adhesive standoffs.

The current Mesa layouts are very good, they still work just fine for wiring with the connector density. DIN tray and connector options would be nice for like a FPGA card that had only 26pin connectors and then some parallel IO cards that could slip into the same DIN tray or something like that.

Of course if these were versions that were available alongside the regular versions, more options the merrier as long as supply doesn't become an issue. That seems like a hell of a long product line to support though. The 7i76e and 7i96 are general purpose, all-in-one cards. Can't get too specialized on them or else they eliminate themselves from certain scenarios

tommylight wrote:

my1987toyota wrote:

... they hold wires with ferrules far better then spring terminals .

Forgot to mention that, that is what i was thinking when replying.
Now that i finally CAN buy locally ferules (not much of a choice, but made by Wiha so very good quality), it would not be nice to deprive me of all that squeezing of those crimping tool handles, hard and yet strangely soft.... what was i saying?
 

I call em "wire pins", they work just as well in spring TBs as seen in the pic I posted. I've never seen a spring-pluggable block, and again they generally can't be easily probed. So I say stick with screws, just iterating that wire pins are not a problem