Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom Edit New page
regymm edited this page Apr 7, 2023 · 37 revisions

Welcome to the EBAZ4205 wiki!

This is a community project, so if you have any useful information, feel free to edit this page, add additional pages, etc.

You don't need to be a contributor, only a Github account is required.

Guidelines

Since contribution is open (and encouraged!) for everyone, let's follow a few rules to prevent this becoming a mess

  • for images on the Wiki, use an image hosting platform which doesn't expire, like Imgur
  • for files that are directly related to the EBAZ4205 board and useful for the whole community, add them to this repository with a pull request
  • for files that are related to various add-on boards, example projects, etc.
  • if you have used any existing resources, be sure to acknowledge and link to the work.
    Everybody likes the warm fuzzy feeling of contribution, so let's make sure more people get it :)

If you have any questions, just ask in the Telegram group or post in the documentation section of discussions, and we'll figure something out. The materials(tutorials, videos, buildroot images, PYNQ images) collected by various persons from the Telegram group is available for download at http://149.28.136.195:4205/ .

Table of Contents

Generated using "Markdown All in One" (yzhang.markdown-all-in-one) plugin in VSCode.

Hardware

EBAZ4205 board

Getting the board

You can source it from multiple places

  • XianYu (Idlefish) is the chinese Craigslist and the initial source of these boards. This is where you can get them the cheapest, but it's only available to locals.

  • Taobao is a well known reseller site. Boards go for about 30 CNY ($5) here. While Taobao only ships to specific foreign countries, there are reshipping services which can ship to other countries.

    See https://www.howtotao.com/buy-from-taobao/ for more info.

  • AliExpress is a reseller site adapted for foreigners. It's the simplest to buy from, but boards usually go for > $10.

  • ebay, but it's not recommended, people seem to be price gouging these boards

Search for "ebaz", "ebaz4205", "zynq".

Do note that since these boards were usually used and stored in pretty bad conditions, some may have defects, so buying multiple is recommended.

Revisions

There seem to be two variants of these boards floating around:

  • the initial version, which has the ethernet crystal, optocouplers
  • the cost-reduced version, same PCB, but with the aforementioned components missing

They are suspected to have different bitstreams (presumably to support crystal-less operation of the ethernet phy).

None of these boards had all components populated (schematics list these components as NC).

This page provides some more info on the parts which may be missing from your board and their relevance.

Schematic & PCB files

https://github.com/xjtuecho/EBAZ4205/tree/master/HW/ebaz4205

Currently only the PCB design file has been found, the schematic is only available as a pdf export, but there are efforts underway to recreate the schematic in KiCad.

Expansion boards

There are a couple boards available from various vendors

but as this board was initially a miner controller and not a development board, options are limited.

Some community effort has already been seen on chinese forums

TODO link them here

and the community is encouraged to develop its own boards

Basic daughter board schematics and Gerber files providing VGA, PS2 Keyboard and 2.54mm IO header available at link below https://github.com/dave18/EBAZ4205-Daughter-Board

TODO provide a template for a hardware module, similar to Digilents PMOD.

Programming/Debug adapters

Options go from $60 Digilent programming cables to $5 FTDI JTAG dongles.

Tools that worked for people (feel free to add your own):

One can also use a raspberry pi or another ebaz board as programming cable (Xilinx Virtual Cable).

TODO create and link a page with detailed programming instructions (both Vivado and open source tools) - for now, see issue #4

Software

Development tools

The Zynq Book is all about the Xilinx Zynq®-7000 All Programmable System on Chip (SoC) from Xilinx.

http://www.zynqbook.com/

Nandland - FPGA Fundamentals.

https://www.nandland.com/articles/fpga-101-fpgas-for-beginners.html

ProgrammerSought articles about modifying and programming EBAZ4205

https://programmersought.com/article/80046040945/

https://programmersought.com/article/39142405511/

Examples

Beyond EBAZ

We live in an exciting time where once prohibitively expensive hardware and software tools have become available to the average hobbyist.

EBAZ is a good example, but there are other very good candidates which you can look into:

EBAZ series:

  • There are different kinds of EBAZ miner control boards, including EBAZ4205(the common one), EBAZ4203, EBAZ4303, T9+, S9+, ...
  • 4205 is the most common one, and the cheapest
  • 4203 is quite interesting because it has two DDRs(often comes with only one though) and the xc7z010 chip can be replaced with a better xc7z020 without any problem, the IO connectors are also compatible with 4205
  • T9+ and S9+ also have two DDRs, but IO connectors are quite different

Sub $15:

Sub $50:

Sub $100:

Above $100, but honorable mentions

  • ULX3S - multiple versions, Lattice ECP5 12F to 85F

This link from Hackaday contains some other boards:

  • FPGA Board Hack - mostly Altera series, and some haven't been investigated carefully yet

TODO list other cheap FPGA development boards - bonus points if they are open source

And if you want to try yourself in ASIC development, there's also Google SkyWater PDK ;)

Add a custom footer
Add a custom sidebar
Clone this wiki locally