Csepp 🌢May 29, 2023
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
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 🌢

@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
May 30, 2023 at 5:15pmWeb
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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