This thread will be for quick announcements on action happening in the electronic cause area. Feel free to discuss.
Just stocked up the cause with 50 of both female and male 40pin headers. A small collection of DuPont wire has been added. A small assorted box of crimp connectors (spade) has also arrived.
The headers are stored in the lower draws of the capacitor parts cabinet.
Thanks blair
We now have a syringe of thick flux sitting above the soldering bench and a syringe of leaded solder paste in the fridge. 1kg of solder was also ordered and is stored for when we run out of our current roll.
We have received a substantial donation of FPGA devboards, Perfect for learning to write VHDL on. Not sure what toolchain you would use, but they are altium branded Xilinx based FPGA’s, so Altium’s FPGA tools would be a good start.
We also received some 8bit microcontroller debuggers for microchip’s PIC microcontrollers.
We also had a pair of nice multimeters donated, with the red one capable of performing datalogging.
@Testicky, thankyou for your donations. More details on what exactly was donated can be found here.
Finally, I’ve put in some new fuses for our bench multimeters, so the mA current ranges should now work again!
For the FPGA, The tools are on the CDs inside their respective boxes. Licences Keys are also inside the boxes. All these FPGA boards will work up to Altium Designer V17 (up to AD17). All the necessary software are inside
these boxes as well if you do not have an installation on your machine yet.
I will bring back one CAD station for the FPGA development tools the next time I am back in Brisbane.
I have one spare CAD Desktop Station with 4-displays 21". The two large FPGA dev Boards were utilized on that CAD Station. It is probably better to have a fixed system as these projects can be long to learn and to finish… having one fixed cad station at the HSBNE would help people playing with these devices.
ALtium provide a lot of built-in libraries and you can configure the hardware using C-to Hardware too, not
just HDL. There are Soft-Core in these systems too and compilers for these soft cores are also in Altium Designer.
For the Microchip Development tools, they all use MPLAB. I did drop the books related to these over the weekend.
Mark me down as interested in trying one out. I’ve always wanted to learn to FPGA. 
At LCA I learnt how to program HDL from python!
https://linux.conf.au/programme/miniconfs/fpga/
Happy to share more links if interested
About these FPGA development boards, one (the Nanoboard 3000) is nowhere to be found. Could it be that someone did take it home to learn how to use it?
I am back for a few weeks and I wanted to setup these dev boards on a CAD station with the 4-displays as well as use that same computer to be able to use the In-Circuit Debuggers and all the dev boards.
I did add lot of new dev and learning boards. I will document these asap.
If anyone knows where the nanoboard 3000 is, please let us know.
Documentation for MPLAB-X and the C32 compiler etc… is also in printed form on the bench.
Many dev boards are from Olimex.com ccsinfo.com and microchip.com
Graphic TFT Dev Boards are also in the smaller draws, Serial buses learning kits: i2c, spi, etc… and two can bus learning kits, etc…
There are about 12 In-Circuit Debugger/Programmer (some attached to dev boards) in the draws as well.
There are A/D learning boards, PIC32 Dev Boards etc… as well as many prototypes boards for a one off project. A few Web development boards with I/Os from olimex, etc…
Hopefuly in the next few days, if Blair has time, we can document/inform using stickers.
The user’s manuals for the CCS-C compilers are also printed and available on the benches.
We did add new test leads do a few instruments, so that they can stay permanently on these
About nearly all the types of Dev Boards from Microchip are there (android, bluetooth, wifi, etc…).
There are a few multimedia dev boards too with sd card, BT and wifi.
I know exactly there the dev board is. I have it. If you scroll up, you’ll see I expressed an interested in learning about fpgas and I’m doing precisely that.
Great.
It works up to AD17.
