Fomu An FPGA board that fits inside your USB port

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

amelius•about 3 hours ago

But is it fast enough to do USB 3?

If so, here's a nice and simple project idea: that board with two USB connectors and connect it to the two ends of the same cable; you send a pseudorandom bitstream down one end and verify if it comes out correctly at the other end and report the bit error rate (USB cable tester)

jedbrooke•about 3 hours ago

looks like it only has the physical connections for USB 2. Fun fact about usb 3, it’s really a completely separate physical standard from usb 2, just designed in such a way that a single port can have BOTH usb 2.0 and 3.0 connectors in it at the same time. In theory this would allow for devices to use the full bandwidth of 3.0 + the full bandwidth of 2.0, but as far as I know no device does that.

15155•about 1 hour ago

> In theory this would allow for devices to use the full bandwidth of 3.0 + the full bandwidth of 2.0, but as far as I know no device does that.

Not as a single device (no XHCI controllers allow this), but yes if you presented two devices to the OS (with some XHCI controllers.)

kej•about 3 hours ago

Apparently there is a newer Qomu device that combines the FPGA and an MCU: https://www.crowdsupply.com/quicklogic/qomu

jauntywundrkind•about 3 hours ago

Its a cool board! Second submission on it ~7 years ago got a tiny bit of traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488397

There's a fun/interesting lesson on some creative routing for the ice40 FPGA FPGA here. Which I re-stumbled into just last week by happenstance. https://danielmangum.com/posts/spi-routing-ice40-fpga/

One of the makers Tim @mithro Ansell is pretty great. A bit quieter on the social media these days, but https://bsky.app/profile/mith.ro

Fomu An FPGA board that fits inside your USB port

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Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews