Arduino MKR Vidor 4000

The Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 brings Arduino’s ease of use to the work with the most powerful reprogrammable chips that exist: FPGAs. With Vidor, you can create a board where all pins are PWM signals controlling the speed of motors. You can capture sound in real-time and make a sound effect pedal for your guitar. It is possible to create a real-time computer reading sensor information and sending it to a state-of-the-art monitor or capture video and overlay sensor information on the image that will then later be sent over to a screen. You can connect to the Arduino IoT Cloud and control a complex laboratory machine running a large number of motors. You could even prototype your own processors inside the FPGA and have them work in parallel to the other microcontroller on the board. Vidor is a device that invites experimentation, precision, and high-speed computation.

The board comes with 8 MB of SRAM to support the FPGA operations on video and audio. The FPGA code is stored in a 2 MB QSPI Flash chip, of which 1 MB is allocated for user applications. It is possible to perform high-speed DSP operations for audio and video processing. Therefore, the Vidor includes a Micro HDMI connector for audio and video output and a MIPI camera connector for video input. All of the board’s pins are driven both by SAMD21 and FPGA while respecting the MKR family format.

  Useful Steps:

1. Open the Arduino IDE. Go to Tools->Boards->Boards Manager. Search and install “arduino SAMD boards”.
2. Go to Tools->Manage Libraries. Search and install “WiFiNINA ver. 1.3.0” library.
3. Go to File->Examples->WiFiNINA->Scan Networks. Select correct COM port. Compile and upload the program.  Check the output in Serial Monitor.

Features:

1. All pins are PWM pins
2. MIPI camera connector
3. Mini PCI Express port with programmable pins
4. Full-Speed USB Device and embedded Host

FPGA Block Specifications:

1. FPGA: Intel® Cyclone® 10CL016
2. PCI: Mini PCI Express port with programmable pins
3. Camera Connector: MIPI camera connector
4. Circuit Operating Voltage: 3.3V
5. Digital I/O Pins: 22 headers + 25 Mini PCI Express
6. PWM Pins: All Pins
7. UART: Up to 7 (depends on FPGA configuration)
8. SPI: Up to 7 (depends on FPGA configuration)
9. I2C: Up to 7 (depends on FPGA configuration)
10. Analog Input Pins: n/a
11. Analog Output Pins: n/a
12. External Interrupts: n/a
13. DC Current per I/O Pin:4 or 8 mA
14. Flash Memory:2 MB
15. SDRAM: 8 MB
16. EEPROM:n/a
17. Clock Speed:48 MHz – up to 200 MHz
18. Video Output: Micro HDMI

Package Includes:

1 x Arduino MKR Vidor 4000