Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA Dev Board (Numato Mimas V2)

20 February, 2024

My new Spartan 6 FPGA based development board just got delivered today!

I always wanted to learn FPGA programming (Verilog/VHDL) but didn't have any reason to do so.

Recently, I had a thought of using my old android phone (with a broken display) as a computer by connecting it to a display and attaching a keyboard and mouse. The only way I found for connecting it to a display was to use an HDMI to USB Micro (Or USB C) dongle converter (like this one). But I didn't want to go for it as I wanted something with low-to-none latency.

Then it came to my mind... FPGA! I could build a system that converts MIPI DSI to HDMI with a powerful enough FPGA.

Then I started doing some research and found the Numato Mimas V2 Spartan 6 dev board, to be sufficient and also cheap when compared to other dev boards (newer Spartan 7, Artix 7, etc dev boards are costly!). It's available on amazon as well (for ~₹9000) but I ordered it directly from their website as it was ₹2000 cheaper.

Here are some pictures. Apologies for the bad quality, my phone camera isn't that great.

It arrived within 3 days of ordering and in good packaging. It was sent via EMS Speed Post.

Outer packaging

Box inside

Some pictures of the board:

Front profile

Rear profile

Width (~12cm)

Height (~7.4cm)

The AMD (Xilinx) Spartan 6 (XC6SLX9) in CSG324 package

This thing has a lot of peripherals on board, here is an image I took from the Numato website showcasing them:

Mimas V2 onboard peripherals, courtesy of numato.com

I haven't yet plugged it in since I don't have a Mini USB cable nor a JTAG programmer. I have ordered a Mini USB cable (yes mini USB, it was hard to find locally) and lets see how this goes.

As for the display converter project, it'll have to wait as I still don't know a thing about programming FPGAs. But I have started to learn Verilog and will start doing some beginner stuff once I get my mini USB cable.

Welp, that's all folks, see you in the next one!