[Coco] MCC-216

[Frank Swygert]

Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2013 20:15:05 -0600
From: Allen Huffman<alsplace at pobox.com>

And from catching up here briefly, it seems the boards it runs on are 
evaluation boards that come and go and change. So there's no FPGA 
production board made? Seems like there could be tons of applications 
for something like that. What would it cost to have something based on 
one of the eval boards made (that's the intent of eval boards, after all)?
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That's what I pointed out earlier. It seems there are no generic boards 
for experimenters or short runs, just the evaluation boards. Part of the 
reason is that FPGAs are typically used for some custom application, and 
a specific board is then made, usually using an ASIC instead. It seems 
that there would be a market for a somewhat generic FPGA board for 
experimenters. It would have to be a bit targeted, but one targeted for 
the computer emulation market should be a good start. I suppose a board 
with just double row headers that could have daughter boards plugged in 
would be the ultimate generic board. Then the daughter boards would have 
the specific connectors on them. The daughter boards could be rather 
simple to make, just connectors and a few of discrete parts (depending 
on how much you put on the FPGA), but would be specific to each use. I 
think one made similar to the DE-1 with some of the things missing but 
still with some GPIO (maybe no more than a 10 pin header) that could be 
customized would be a start.