[Oberon] Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 (was New Hardware for Oberon / Risc-5 ?)

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Markus:

> they write ___SRAM___

> It comes loaded with hardware and potential: an 8 MB _____SRAM_____;

It depends, where they write it. "This board hosts a number of features: onboard 8 Mbyte SDRAM".
www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/MKRVidor4000

I took the photo of the board (www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/MKRVidor4000#toc10), magnified with IrfanView, sharpened the image (it was blurry), and I could read the chip part number which starts with "AS4C". I typed AS4C into DigiKey search, and a list of Alliance Memory parts came up. All of these are SDRAM chips of various kinds. 

> Thats the reason why I was so elctrified about this product.
> But I fear its a typo, SRAM would be quite unusual.

It is SDRAM. 8 megs of SRAM would take more space.

> Have seen a schematic anywhere? I can't found it.

The information density of their web is pretty low. The ratio of advertising blurb to true information is high.

It is one more of these "look how easy the computer programming is you do not need to know much just type in a few commands...". Their FPGA programming tutorial is somewhat sketchy. If you want to learn FPGA then you need to buy Pong Chu books and read them. A couple web pages will not do.

The board itself may be OK, but look at the interfaces. The general purpose ones are a small bunch of 0.1" pins. Good for driving LEDs, pushbuttons, PWM, etc. Not good for any performance apps. 

Just my 2 cents.

Wojtek