The ULX3S is great! I built myself an early prototype a year ago, and have used it every so often for occasional hacks. It has since evolved to be a first-class citizen in a number of projects and frameworks (LiteX, including LiteDRAM), which makes it great to get started with.
Also worth noting, that you can use a fully open source flow (Yoys + nextpnr + prjtrellis) for this FPGA family. Here's a repository I made that shows a basic blinky for an ULX3S: https://github.com/q3k/ulx3s-foss-blinky/
Yeah I also DIY'd one and it makes an excellent dev kit - the right combo of peripherals in a small footprint. It also has a lot of IO's on normal 0.1" headers so it's a good starting point if you want to stack it on top of another prototype PCB. Your blinky was actually the first code I ran on it.
It is the fully open design flow that I really enjoy. I have a couple of IceBreakers[1] which have a smaller Lattice part and they are quite capable. I find the addition of the ESP32 compelling as an interesting "hard" processor.
Comments
The ULX3S is great! I built myself an early prototype a year ago, and have used it every so often for occasional hacks. It has since evolved to be a first-class citizen in a number of projects and frameworks (LiteX, including LiteDRAM), which makes it great to get started with.
Also worth noting, that you can use a fully open source flow (Yoys + nextpnr + prjtrellis) for this FPGA family. Here's a repository I made that shows a basic blinky for an ULX3S: https://github.com/q3k/ulx3s-foss-blinky/
Yeah I also DIY'd one and it makes an excellent dev kit - the right combo of peripherals in a small footprint. It also has a lot of IO's on normal 0.1" headers so it's a good starting point if you want to stack it on top of another prototype PCB. Your blinky was actually the first code I ran on it.
It is the fully open design flow that I really enjoy. I have a couple of IceBreakers[1] which have a smaller Lattice part and they are quite capable. I find the addition of the ESP32 compelling as an interesting "hard" processor.