Dadamachines Doppler is a new FPGA Platform for Open Music Hardware

The new doppler board promises to meld the power of FPGA brains with microcontrollers and the accessibility of environments like Arduino. And the founder is so confident that could lead to new stuff, he’s making a “label” to help share your ideas.

doppler is a small, 39EUR development board packing both an ARM microcontroller and an FPGA. It could be the basis of music controllers, effects, synths – anything you can make run on those chips.

doppler takes that FPGA power, and combines it with the ease of working with environments like Arduino. It’s a chewing gum-sized board with both a familiar ARM microcontroller and an FPGA. This board is bare-bones – you just get USB – but the development tools have been set up for you, and you can slap this on a breadboard and add your own additions (MIDI, audio I/O).

Full specs of the tiny, core starter board:

• 120Mhz ARM Cortex M4F MCU 512KB Flash (Microchip ATSAMD51G19A) with FPU
• FPGA 5000 LUT, 1MBit RAM, 6 DSP Cores,OSC, PLL (Lattice ICE40UP5K)
• Arduino IDE compatible
• Breadboard friendly (DIL48)
• Micro USB
• Power over USB or external via pin headers
• VCC 3.5V …. 5.5V
• All GPIO Pins have 3.3V Logic Level
• 1 LED connected to SAMD51
• 4 x 4 LED Matrix (connected to FPGA)
• 2 User Buttons (connected to FPGA)
• AREF Solder Jumper
• I2C (need external pullup), SPI, QSPI Pins
• 2 DAC pins, 10 ADC pins
• Full open source toolchain
• SWD programming pin headers
• Double press reset to enter the bootloader
• UF2 Bootloader with Firmware upload via simple USB stick mode

doppler is fully open source hardware, with open firmware and code samples, so it’s designed to be easy to integrate into a finished product – even one you might sell commercially.

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