Reminds me of the old Electric Imp, which was like an ESP32 before the ESP32. Also came in a (full size) SD card form factor.
I was actually lucky to have gotten a FOMU from mithro years ago at a hacker event. It was really fun to play around with micropython on the RISC-V softcore [0]! Thanks to RE the entire toolchain (formerly yosys) is open source for the lattice ICE40 [1] and they continue to add more fpga bitstreams like the ECP5.
If anyone is looking for a cheap (~$15) and larger fpga board to tinker with, look no further than the ColorLight 5A-75b [2]
[0] https://github.com/im-tomu/fomu-workshop/blob/master/docs/ri...
[2] https://hackaday.com/2020/01/24/new-part-day-led-driver-is-f...
The only use case that comes to my mind is extracting live data from device strictly recording onto SDcard, but wifi enabled SDcards designed for that purpose are already on the market since 2010 (eyefi).
This sounds fun to play with and get feet wet in HDL, but it's only a lattice ice40, I have no idea what you'd seriously do with this. Usually ice40 are used as glue logic, or multiplexing/buffering a bunch of ADC/DAC chips so the processor can do large data transfers instead of a bunch of tiny ones.
The website claims hardware acceleration and... I doubt they got timing closure on the soft CPU at anything greater than 100MHz and you still have to get data to/from it at likely 30~40 MB/s via an SDMMC bus.
I first I thought this was a regular storage microSD with an FPGA that allows you change the data live as as it is saved or something. But seems to be an fpga that has microSD connection with no real storage capability like you would have in a reguar microSD (other than storage for fpga bitstream), i.e it is not storage device use case. But why microSD? Is it just because you can load the bitstream without having to use uart or jtag?
"The Signaloid C0-microSD has two main use cases: You can either (1) use it as a hot-pluggable FPGA module, or (2) use it as a hot-pluggable Signaloid C0 RISC-V co-processor module."
That is not really a use case. Use case usually gives examples of how they are used in production, i.e, more specific about applications.
I am a bit concerned here. I wonder how much time will pass before someone decide to use it to hack a computer?
What sort of applications is a FPGA in this smaller class useful for?
Though it is cool to see a minute FPGA dev board, I don't see the value proposition here. At $45, it is too expensive to use in a product. What is the killer app for this board?
One can get a significantly more powerful Tang Nano 20K [1] kit on Amazon right now for $31 [2].
[1] wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/tang/tang-nano-20k/nano-20k.html
[2] https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-Sipeed-Development-RISC-V-E...