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In 2018 the MoCo Maker Labs community launched the first Fipsy FPGA board, as part of a community education experience. The goal was to bring Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) – which were described by electrical engineering colleagues as a ‘magical bag’ that can become any kind of digital circuit – to the hobbyist/maker communities. Starting in 2017 our tech community around Washington DC started to actively learn about FPGAs, circuit board design, and hardware description language. This culminated in the original Fipsy prototypes (made by hand in our garage meeting space) which we were excited to bring to hobbyists through crowdfunding in 2018. Prior to this period, most FPGA education was done only in formal setting such as undergraduate, or graduate programs. FGPAs are a logical next step in education after basic microcontrollers such as Arduino, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi.
We have been supporting FPGA education ever since!
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We are now excited to bring the Fipsy FPGA V2 to market, as it is more powerful – and has capacity for many more styles of projects! We noticed in the original Fipsy V1 – some of our projects would not fit in the device, so we were motivated to create version 2 with about 5 times the number of logic cells (LUTs). This is more than 5 times the amount of buildable complexity because of the way that designs are transferred into the fabric of the FPGA circuitry.
The analogy we give people is the Fipsy V1 has enough ‘space’ to store an pinball arcade-like system (see Finite State Machine in our documentation!). The Fipsy V2 can handle basic HDMI and small full color screens and is thus larger.
Mark Shaw from Allied Component Works was kind enough to help us produce the first manufacturing samples of the Fipsy, and is our current manufacturing partner. He is based in Maryland, and has always been open to meeting in person and working on our project. If you have projects were quality is the most important attribute, be sure to reach out to Mark.
If you are looking for prototype, power systems, advanced boards, military spec designs, or advanced electrical engineering – please use our friends at Allied Component Works.
