Hi,
the original BeagleBone Black/Green had a lot of PWMs, UARTs and some quadrature encoder inputs on its two 48-pin connectors. When looking into the pinout of the V Fire, I can see none or very few of these hardware interfaces only.
So my question: is this because the documentation is still somewhat generic or does the new BeagleV Fire / its new SoC really misses all of these hardware interfaces?
Thanks!
Don’t quote me on this, but I think it depends on what you have loaded into the FPGA part of the Fire.
The hard IPs are marked in the box for you:
More detailed information here.
This document is what confuses me. According to it, there is no PWM, no quadrature encoder input, just the UARTS. This would be incredibly poor comparing to the AM3358 :-o
And you’re absolutely right.
If value is put on the hard IPs alone and you ignore the FPGA part,
you end up with a terrible value proposition. The AM335x is absolutely loaded in that comparison.
But here’s the thing; once you’re out of PWMs or maybe you could use an extra QE input, then what?
With the AM335x you’re pretty much out of luck. With the PF, you just “make” another…
I would say that the real value of the PolarFire is the FPGA part, but that’s just me.
Value is in the eye of the beholder…
So without doing anything with that FPGA-part, this board is more or less useless!?
What a pity…so the V-fire seems to be just an other failed successor of the BBB/BBG, right as all the other BeagleBone-variants which came up during last years and died quickly…
The whole point of the Fire is the FPGA part. If you need a quadrature encoder, the IP is provided to implement one on the FPGA. Same for PWM and any number of other functions. Using the FPGA you can go way beyond what for example the BBB can do. If you buy a Fire without planning on using the FPGA, you have bought the wrong board.
