Dear followers , we have important news to share. Has been a long time since the last communication! sorry about that, time pases very fast and seems as yesterday when we wrote the last entry in the blog.
The most important announcement that we are making today is that we have SOLD all the IceZum Alhambra v1.1 kits and we are starting to sell and ship the new Alhambra II v1.0 kit ( Price 49.9 EUR + Taxes ) . It is a new design with some improvements over the IceZum Alhambra I :
- We got rid of the level converters and now GPIOs work better. (For example when driving motors).
- We changed some components to facilitate the mounting process which allowed us to lower a little bit the price.
- It uses a FPGA ice40 HX 4K (with the Open Source toolchain goes up to 8K) which allows Arduino Core to be run inside, and other advance projects.
- Cold Boot bitstream selection pins accesible through GPIO.
- Bigger user switches easier to use.
We want to say thank you to all the supporters because without your help this message wouldn’t have been possible, and now that the Alhambra II is ready don’t be shy and let’s keep working building the community.
Unfortunately, first deliveries are happening in Spain. Good news is that during September we will start shipments in “Las Americas”
The second announcement is that we were at Maker Faire Bay Area 2018 thanks to Luke Valenty creator of TinyFPGA. It was amazing that we were able to talk just 5 minutes because his booth was totally full of people asking about TinyFPGAs boards, IceStudio, what was Open FPGA about, etc. and it was in the same place where Arduino announced his FPGA kit !
The third announcement is that we started to deliver kits from USA to North and South America, which has reduced a lot the time to deliver. We offer payments with paypal in USD for these regions. Kits can be bought in our web page or also at Tindie. As a note, we have learnt that not all the countries work the same in respect to delivery times, unfortunately there is a local agency in its country that we don’t have control over it, which sometimes adds extra time (could be weeks) to the shipment. As an alternative we offer FEDEX service… but it is expensive… We keep working to improve this by searching local suppliers in each country. Meanwhile the only thing we can say is thank you for your patience.
Going to engineering efforts, the team has been really busy, not only making the Alhambra II, releasing IceStudio v0.3.3 (which includes support for the Alhambra II) and making more tutorials (we are at 25), but also travelling to conferences, building kits and giving trainings. Here you have a summary:
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FOSDEM (Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2018)
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“Campamento tecnológico URJC: charla/taller de FPGAs libres. (Madrid, 12 & 14 June 2018)
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Curso de verano en la Universidad de Cantabria, (slides). (Camargo (Cantabria), 2 – 6 July 2018)
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Curso Diseño de sistemas digitales en Verilog usando FPGAs Libres (21h) for high school teachers (Madrid, Mayo 2018)
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Award at OpenExpo to @Obijuan_cube: Special mention as OpenSource divulger
Lastly we want to say thank you to Neil Cutcliffe for giving us very good tips and recommendations based on his experience on Deep Space Sparkle. Amazing web to learn how to teach art for kids. Thank you.
Best regards
Alhambrabits team