A dive into a popular low-cost ECP5 development board by Chris Lasocki This guest post is the first in a two part series by Chris Lasocki. Part 2 is now available here . It seems that it was an accident - a generic part of a LED display has become a low cost FPGA development board. The board in question is the Colorlight 5A-75B, which is a so-called receiver card. Featuring a Lattice ECP5 FPGA, supported by Yosys, it allows you to leverage a fully open-source FPGA development toolchain. Priced on average at 20-25 USD, it is a very accessible board. The Colorlight 5A-75B was originally a part of a modular LED display standard. It’s a receiver card, which means that it sits between the computer controlling the show, and the LED panels themselves. It fulfills a basic but crucial task of receiving the video signal and driving the RGB panels accordingly. This takes a lot of bandwidth, so it is equipped with a moderately fast ECP5 LFE5U25-F FPGA and two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.…