Arduino MKR Vidor 4000: A new revolution?

More than 15 years on from the creation of the Arduino board, which took place at the Interaction Design School of Ivrea in 2003, there is by now no doubt that the idea conceived by the team led by Massimo Banzi has revolutionised forever the world of interactive electronic-system design.

With the invention of Arduino, the programming of microcontrollers — a traditionally complex subject and the domain of a few specialised engineers — became accessible to everyone, especially to an audience of designers, creatives and artists usually without skills in electronic and computing technologies.

This process of democratisation, abetted by the open source culture that permeated the entire project, has favoured the development of new products and triggered part of the innovation process that today we call Industry 4.0.

The very entry of the maker movement into the cultural mainstream has been favoured by the market fallout of the many inventions born within the global network of Fab Labs developed with the new rapid-prototyping paradigms — for the first time in the hands of people with humanistic, not necessarily technological, culture.

Microcontrollers are inside many products that regulate the daily life of all of us, from the car’s control unit to the control system in every household appliance, and are much more pervasive than microprocessors — the heart of computers, smartphones and tablets.

But there is another category of electronic chips, equally important and equally pervasive, especially in the world of high technology and telecommunications. These are the so-called FPGAs, an acronym for Field Programmable Gate Array.

What is it about?

To understand it, we need to give some information on the building blocks at the base of modern digital electronics.

Most of today’s electronic devices are based on digital electronics, that is on electronic circuits that process electrical signals reduced to two fundamental values, ideally represented by the two numbers of binary arithmetic, 1 and 0, but also by the two electrical states that are easiest to generate and to understand: on or off.

A modern electronic device has inside it circuits composed of millions of components capable of combining digital signals. The simplest of the components of these circuits — the fundamental brick — is called a “logic gate”. Each gate is capable of combining several input signals to provide an output result.

A digital electronic system is nothing but a network of millions of interconnected logic gates.

Designers of electronic systems can build their products by interconnecting chips that contain standard functions inside, can use programmable chips like microcontrollers — which inside have a predefined structure but can store sequences of instructions that serve to perform the desired functions — or can design an ad-hoc electronic circuit, that is a new and original network of logic gates that develops the desired functionality.

The design of these new electronic chips is done with dedicated software programs, which generate instructions and images used to fabricate silicon chips with the desired circuit inside.

Once ‘etched’, encapsulated in plastic packaging and out of the production line, an electronic chip is unmodifiable. If we want to vary or implement new functions we have to repeat the process and fabricate a new chip.

Setting up a new chip and producing the first specimens is the part of the process that requires the highest investment. If we produce thousands of chips from the initial prototype, the investment is diluted across the number of specimens produced. Fabricating a chip once the production line has been set up costs little. This is the reason why new technologies are expensive at the beginning and proposed on the market at a high price, and after a few months the cost goes down and within a few years it becomes almost negligible.

In the case where the designer intends to experiment with a particular solution for their product, or the final chip is intended for applications that do not require mass production — think of the space sector, where complex systems such as satellites are produced in often unique specimens — setting up a production line can be an unsustainable investment. For this reason, starting from the second half of the 1980s, a technology has spread that allows you to ‘program’ and reprogram, as needed, the network of logic gates inside a dedicated silicon chip.

An FPGA is precisely an array, in Rome we would say a ‘sfilza’ (string), of logic gates that can be interconnected at will, building any digital circuit using suitable electrical signals and suitable design and control software.

An FPGA is therefore a mass-produced — and therefore inexpensive — chip that can be specialised and transformed into the particular digital chip designed by the designer. This operation is reversible and can be performed many times, making experiments and development for successive prototypes possible, and is also the way to obtain specialised chips at low cost.

Obviously things are a bit more complex and articulated than as we have told them, but the basic concept is more or less this.

Programming FPGAs is not easy and requires very specific and specialised knowledge.

Programming microcontrollers was also not within everyone’s reach until the advent of Arduino.

You will then understand the excitement and the great expectation generated by the announcement made in May this year at the Maker Faire in San Francisco by Massimo Banzi, the father of Arduino, of taking on the FPGA market — bringing to this sector too the logic that democratised the world of Microcontrollers.

The announcement referred to a new specific product called MKR Vidor 4000. Basically an Arduino Microcontroller paired with an FPGA, all programmable from the Arduino development system with the same logic of using libraries that facilitate the process and make it accessible to everyone.

The success of Arduino derives precisely from the development method applied by its users. It is a method typical of makers and in English is called tinkering. In Italian it is untranslatable, but a child playing and creating with Lego is doing tinkering.

Programming an FPGA with a sort of Lego brick is something that could take the maker revolution one step further.

The first MKR Vidor 4000 has just arrived at Spazio Chirale and we tested it.

We configured the usual Arduino programming software as per instructions to use the new board, downloaded the new libraries prepared by the Arduino community to experiment with the FPGA component, and with a couple of Lego bricks present in these libraries we processed — as if it were nothing — the TV signal captured by a camera and sent to our 4K megascreen in the lab using the micro-HDMI connector on the Vidor 4000.

The first sensation is that in the coming months we will see great things!