Ice40 wearable v1

iCE40 Wearables

This repo contains board designs (KiCad) for two iCE40 FPGA-based boards: one in a sewable form-factor and one in a cat-ear form factor.

Board 1: Sewable

This board is inspired by the Adafruit Flora and is meant to be sewn into clothing or accessories. It is shaped as a small circle and has all the components on the front side to allow it to sit flush against a flat surface. It includes the following features:

• iCE40UP5K FPGA
• 16Mb QSPI Flash (GD25Q16CSIGR)
• 16MHz Oscillator (SIT2001BI, multiple frequency options available)
• PWR/DONE/USER LEDs, USER pushbutton
• RGB LED (WS2812)
• 14 Electric Sewing Pads: 12x GPIO, 1x 3V3, 1x GND
• USB-C port
• JST power header
• Tag-Connect programming header

Schematic is in ice40_sewable_board/schematic.pdf

An example design (that utilizes the button, USER LED, RGB LED, and one of the sewing pads) is in ice40_sewable_ref_design/

Board 2: Cat-ears

This board is meant to be shaped like a cat-ear, such that two of them can be worn on a headband (the GPIO pins can be wired together to provide synchronization between the ears). It was designed as a tribute to YosysHQ who develop open-source FPGA software tooling. Each ear includes the following features:

• iCE40UP5K FPGA (internal 48MHz oscillator is used to simplify BOM)
• 16Mb QSPI Flash (GD25Q16CSIGR)
• 7x RGB LED (WS2812)
• Power options: JST power header OR CR2032 coin cell holder
• 2.54mm programming & GPIO header (can be programmed with small wire clips or by soldering)
• Additional GPIO pads on rear side for soldering

Schematic is in ice40_catears_board/schematic.pdf

An example design (that builds separate modules for the left and right ears, and utilizes the RGB LEDs and GPIO pads) is in ice40_catears_ref_design/

Acknowledgements

Board design was inspired by electronutlabs-public/ice-bling and icebreaker-fpga/icebreaker. CMU TechSpark and RoboClub were used for fabrication and materials.