Pluto, Pluto-II and Pluto-3 FPGA boards

FPGA development boards that plug into a PC's serial port.

Characteristics

(1) Pluto-II JTAG signals are accessible but require manual soldering of 6 wires to the board.

• Easy to use - controlled from a PC's serial port.
• Small form factor - go into a 'solderless-breadboard' for experiments, or used as motherboards or daughterboards for other projects.
• Few on-board peripherals, most IOs available to connect to external peripherals.
• Built-in voltage regulator, allows to use a common DC adapter as power supply.
• Flashy boards compatible, to build an acquisition system or digital oscilloscope.
• Built-in 'secondary' connector.

FPGA configuration

Select a bitfile, and click the 'Configure!' button in the provided application. The process takes 10 to 20 seconds. The boot-PROM can also programmed/verified/erased (with Pluto-II and Pluto-3 only, since Pluto doesn't have a boot-PROM).

How to connect the boards to a PC

The Pluto boards connect to a PC's serial port.
The serial port has two purposes:

1. It is used for FPGA/boot-PROM configuration.
2. Once the FPGA is configured, it is used to communicate with the PC (you can write a PC software that give orders to the FPGA, for example).

The secondary connector

This is a small connector found on one side of the Pluto boards. This connector has only 4 pins (2 for power and 2 for IOs) so only serial peripherals can be attached. For example:

• I2C peripherals
• LCDs and LED displays with serial interface

Here's Pluto-II connected to a color graphical LCD through the secondary connector.

JTAG

JTAG is optional and allows using Quartus-II's built-in support, including SignalTap II logic analyzer. To use JTAG, a separate JTAG adapter cable is required.

Flashy

The Pluto boards are compatible with the Flashy ADC daughterboard (Pluto-3 is also compatible with FlashyD=two channels). Check this Hands-on - A digital oscilloscope page for a step-by-step tutorial.

What files do you receive with the Pluto boards?

• Board documentation (view online here) (PDF)
• FPGAconf configuration software (Windows EXE)
• FlashyDemo (FPGA bitfile + GUI)

• LED (HDL source code)
• Music (HDL source code)
• SerialRxTx (HDL + C source code)
• Pong VGA (HDL source code)
• FlashyMiny (HDL + C source code)

To purchase a board

Go to the Shop - FPGA development boards (RS-232) page.