Csepp 🌢
The #FPGA uxn thread is giving me Ideas. What could one do with a salvaged FPGA and are they even salvageable? What kind of equipment would one need to make use of them?
Found this SE thread so far:
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/32746/cheap-old-consumer-devices-to-recover-fpga-boards-from
cc #salvageComputing / #collapseComputing
Cheap/old consumer devices to recover FPGA boards from

Various FPGA suppliers claim that their devices are increasingly used in mass-market consumer devices. Given the general depreciation of device prices with time, and high price for even old FPGA bo...

Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange
May 29, 2023 at 6:44pmWeb
Show threadCsepp 🌢May 29, 2023
Alternatively, could one use a salvaged FPGA not for computation per-se, but for hacking/repairing other salvaged hardware? Like, could one make a logic analyzer from one, or do fault injection?
cc #electronics #reverseEngineering
Show threadCsepp 🌢May 29, 2023
This is really hecin cool for example: http://nsa.unaligned.org/index.php
NSA :: Overview

Show threadBastelwombatMay 29, 2023
@csepp I guess your step one would be, to check for which FPGAs you can get a software toolchain. I only know of a #FOSS toolchain for lattice iCE. Then you could search for open source projects using that chain.
Show threadBastelwombatMay 29, 2023
@csepp What I'm trying to say is: You might be getting powerfull chips for little money by buying devices as suggested in that thread, but unless you have code to run on them, or at least the toolchain to create your own code, they'll be useless bricks.
Show threadWimⓂ️May 30, 2023
@csepp I missed the thread. In principle you can salvage them, esp. if they are on a general-purpose board. But usually it's no longer possible to find the software to program them, because it's proprietary. Depends how old they are of course.
Show threadCsepp 🌢May 30, 2023

@wim_v12e This is the thread in question https://merveilles.town/@neauoire/110452579721864341

Hmm, that's unfortunate. I suppose it would be rather difficult to reverse engineer the programming protocol without access to the toolchain, right? Are older models maybe easier targets?

Devine Lu Linvega (@[email protected])

@sejo @domnantas @alderwick I've managed to talk most people who were interest out of it ;)

Merveilles
Show threadWimⓂ️May 30, 2023

@csepp I had a look and at least for Xilinx, it's not so bad. You can still download the tools for 20-year-old FPGAs: https://www.xilinx.com/downloadNav/vivado-design-tools/archive-ise.html

And I think the license is free.

Bad news is, you'll need an OS of the same era to run the tools.

Reverse engineering the encryption might be possible, I recall there were papers on that at the time.

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