<div dir="ltr"><div>First I highly recommend everyone to create their own business. When you work for someone else you learn how to do things, when you work for yourself you start learning the right things to do. Additionally when you are in business and need to make income, you learn how the value creation feedback loop works. That is all your friends and contacts will offer you advice, but until you tune <b>your </b>feedback loop for <b>your </b>business on how to create value for <b>your </b>customers you are not really in business, it is more of a hobby. </div><div><br></div><div>I would say the key to success is to create more value to customers than it costs them to get it from you. That is your FPGA board must create value to customers, it does not need to be thoughtful, or clever, or even well engineered. It needs to provide a positive return on value for your customers. </div><div><br></div>1. What is different about your board than other FPGA eval boards from many FPGA vendors and suppliers? <div>2. What value does your board and examples does it have that helps me solve my problem? Is it designed for video filtering, etc? </div><div><br></div><div>I know I created a number of products for myself as an engineer. When I finally created a product that solves someone else's problem, I marketed, licensed it all wrong and in less than 6 months China had taken the design, firmware and the market. That is that learning was more valuable than anything I did previously, and I would not have learned that without creating business and doing it. </div><div><br></div><div>A single product does not make a business!</div><div>If you build it they will not come! </div><div>If you think that if you build it, that they will come, then put the product up for sale on a website and say it is out of stock, see how many inquiries you get as to when it will be back in stock. This will prove you are right and if you build it they will come. </div><div>If you are not in business, you are not improving your business! </div><div>It is not about doing it right, it is about learning and improving! </div><div>The process of picking products to make is more important than a product!</div><div><br></div><div>So here are a few ideas on how to create value: </div><div><br></div><div><b>Phy protocol analyzer</b> </div><div>We have all used scope for UART/SPI/I2C/CAN/USB signals. There are products like <a href="https://www.saleae.com/" target="_blank">https://www.saleae.com/</a> that are great. However what if you had a product that actually did measurements and reports and told you the problems. For example a device that reported UART baud rate and other parameters and reported rise time, fall time, jitter, etc. Provide engineers the information they would normally use a scope for. Then give them all the data in a nice report format that you would be proud to show off. </div><div><br></div><div><b>Chip Replacement</b></div><div>Many people restore old hardware (PCs, etc) they are often looking for chip replacements, like a replacement for an 8086 or 8051, or UART controller. So what if you took an FPGA and made chip replacements? </div><div><br></div><div><b>Floppy Drive Replacement</b></div><div>I have old equipment that uses floppy drives. I looked for a USB flash replacement for a mechanical floppy drive. The devices I found all had major issues. I contacted a friend who restores old PCs and he indicated he wanted a better floppy drive replacement since he found the same issues. What if you used FPGA to make such a device, maybe at ESP32 such that files are available over wifi? </div><div><br></div><div><b>EEPROM/ROM Replacements</b></div><div>I have older cars and thought about having an EEPROM replacement where I could change the tuning of the car without flashing new firmware. Like the floppy drive the idea was to have a PCB that replaced the memory chip with USB or WIFI access. Then on the fly I could change the tuning of the car computer without reflashing chips. </div><div><br></div><div><b>Buck Boost Controller</b></div><div>I find many engineers do not understand buck/boost power supplies. What if you made a training system where you use an FPGA as a controller to make a 'soft' buck/boost controller? Heck even better is to make the FPGA used for analyzing power supply controllers reporting results, like phase margin, etc. Then give them all the data in a nice report format that you would be proud to show off. </div><div><br></div><div>Are any of these ideas worth creating a product? I do not know, but they might be more valuable than a generic FPGA eval board, as they solve a specific problem out of the box in which you can find the correct customers to market products to. </div><div><br></div><div>Trampas <br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 1:45 PM Kevin Schilf via TriEmbed <<a href="mailto:triembed@triembed.org" target="_blank">triembed@triembed.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><div style="font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><div id="m_-3195680161729171949m_-7594706158282941286ydp728fea48yiv7681423619"><div><div style="font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><div dir="ltr">Hi TriEmbed,</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">This is a shameless attempt at gathering marketing data... :-)</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">I am putting together a FPGA development board with a Lattice FPGA.<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Why choose a FPGA over a micro you say? Good question. FPGA's are more expensive and less fuel efficient than their micro cousins but offer:</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">- Higher throughput</div><div dir="ltr">- The ability to create multiple parallel processing blocks.</div><div dir="ltr">- Numerous I/O standards with more precise timing.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">If you don't need one of these three things you are probably better in a micro; although, I would never say no to a FPGA solution. :-)<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div>Possibilities -</div><div><br></div><div dir="ltr">HW Interfaces- Trusty GPIO of course up to about 1 Gbps, differential standards as such LVDS over 1 Gbps, high speed SerDes (serializer / deserializer) with bit rates up to several Gbps (PCIe, Ethernet, JESD, etc.)</div><br><div dir="ltr">Soft Processor - Avoiding the expensive license fees associated with ARM, RISC-V is an open source Instruction set processor out of Berkeley. Not only can you program the processor but you can change the opcodes by implementing custom instructions in the FPGA's fabric. Linux is available. This is a very exciting possibility :-)<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">IP - baseline RTL (Verilog or VHDL) code to implement certain functionality, video processing, motor control, DSP, etc. This is the secret sauce of the FPGA, but I am looking for building blocks that could be created in advance and absorbed into more sophisticated solutions to ease getting started.<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Price - What is a reasonable price point in a professional, research, or academic setting?<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">The key to success if providing a thoughtful piece of hardware WITH documentation and sample code that makes it useful out of the box. There are enough PCB paperweights in the world already. :-)<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">I look forward to your input. Thank you for your time.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Kevin S<br></div></div></div></div></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>
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