Jacob Creedon designed an a cartridge board that adds 32MB of SDRAM to the Hackaday Supercon badge. Michael Welling just assembled a version of the PCB made with the OSH Park “After Dark” black FR-4 service:
The addition of SDRAM provides enough memory to boot Linux on a RISC-V soft-core in the ECP5 FPGA on the badge. Here’s a screenshot of Linux running:
Read more about “Team Linux on Badge” in this Hackaday post:
A Fantastic Frontier Of FPGA Flexibility Found In The 2019 Supercon Badge
And finally, receiving the biggest applause was Linux-on-Badge: this team used all the badge hacking tricks in the book. The hardware component was a 32 MiB SDRAM cartridge by [Jacob Creedon]. The default badge SOC FPGA bitstream was entirely replaced in order to support a minimalist Linux. Much of the development was done on [Michael Welling]’s computer, guided by the precedence of a LiteX project putting Linux on the Radiona ULX3S. This is a true success story of Supercon collaboration as the team (including [Drew Fustini], [Tim Ansell], [Sean Cross], and many others) came together and worked late into nights, drawing from the massive body of collective expertise of the community.
Watch the demo during the Badge Hacking ceremony (jump to 17m 35s):
Resources:
- KiCad design files are available on GitHub: jcreedon/dram-cart
- Modification to LiteX for the FPGA to use the SDRAM: mwelling/litex-boards
- Shared project on OSH Park: Hackaday Supercon badge SDRAM cartridge
