Finally, today,  the Alhambra kit stock for U.S. left Mareldem’s office. It has been a long wait but now we are getting them in 4/5 days depending on customs. For all of you that were waiting for this notification to make the payment, this is now a good moment. We will start shipping in order of payments (giving priority to the ones already in the paid list). This is the first box out of many.

During this month we have been continuing with the Digital Electronics tutorial and we are approaching the second season end. In th elates chapters we have seen “Counters”, “multiplexers”, “flip-flops”, “timers”,.. and much more powerful projects have came out of it. IceStudio is showing its potential and keeps expanding it limits !

Jesus (@JesusArroyo89) went to the  Orconf 2018 to talk about APIO /  IceSudio  and met with a lot of interesting people that are contributing to all this movement. In this photo he is with  Clifford Wolf ! the father of the IceStorm project which is the base for all of this.

Today’s special mention goes to “El Profe Garcia”  and his video  of the Alhambra II unboxing. The VGA board is not part of the standard kit, we have sent a couple of them to beta testers. We hope to start offering it as a product soon… but we need first to get rid of all the Alhambra’s waiting list !!

Thank you all !

Dear followers , we have important news to share. Has been a long time since the  last communication! sorry about that,  time pases very fast and seems as yesterday when we wrote the last entry in the blog.

The most important announcement that we are making today is that we have SOLD all the IceZum Alhambra v1.1 kits and we are starting to sell and ship  the new Alhambra II v1.0 kit  ( Price 49.9 EUR + Taxes ) . It is a new design with some improvements over the IceZum Alhambra I :

•  We got rid of the level converters and now GPIOs work better. (For example when driving motors).
• We changed some components to facilitate the mounting process which allowed us to lower a little bit the price.
• It uses a FPGA ice40 HX 4K (with the Open Source toolchain goes up to 8K) which allows Arduino Core to be run inside, and other advance projects.
• Cold Boot bitstream selection pins accesible through GPIO.
• Bigger user switches easier to use.

We want to say thank you to all the supporters because without your help  this message wouldn’t have been possible, and now that the Alhambra II is ready don’t be shy and let’s keep working building the community.

Unfortunately, first deliveries are happening in Spain. Good news is that during September we will start shipments in “Las Americas”

The second announcement is that we were at Maker Faire Bay Area 2018 thanks to Luke Valenty creator of TinyFPGA. It was amazing that we were able to talk just 5 minutes because his booth was totally full of people asking about TinyFPGAs boards, IceStudio, what was Open FPGA about, etc. and it was in the same place where Arduino announced his FPGA kit !

The third announcement is that we started to deliver kits from USA to North and South America, which has reduced a lot the time to deliver. We offer payments with paypal in USD for these regions.  Kits can be bought in our web page or also at Tindie. As a note, we have learnt that not all the countries work the same in respect to delivery times, unfortunately there is a local agency in its country that we don’t have control over it, which sometimes adds extra time (could be weeks) to the shipment. As an alternative we offer FEDEX service… but it is expensive… We keep working to improve this by searching local suppliers in each country. Meanwhile the only thing we can say is thank you for your patience.

Going to engineering efforts, the team has been really busy, not only making the Alhambra II, releasing  IceStudio v0.3.3 (which includes support for the Alhambra II) and making more tutorials (we are at 25), but also travelling to conferences, building kits and giving trainings.  Here you have a summary:

1. FOSDEM (Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2018)
2.  Granabot. Slides ( Granada, 11 & 12 May 2018)
3. “Campamento tecnológico URJC:  charla/taller de FPGAs libres. (Madrid, 12 & 14 June 2018)
4. Curso de verano en la Universidad de Cantabria, (slides). (Camargo (Cantabria), 2 – 6 July 2018)
5. Curso Diseño de sistemas digitales en Verilog usando FPGAs Libres (21h) for high school teachers (Madrid, Mayo 2018)
6. Award at OpenExpo to @Obijuan_cube: Special mention as OpenSource divulger

Lastly we want to say thank you to Neil Cutcliffe for giving us very good tips and recommendations based on his experience on Deep Space Sparkle. Amazing web to learn how to teach art for kids. Thank you.

Best regards

Alhambrabits team

• Last week was the FOSDEM 2018 and Juan and Jesus were there talking about IceStudio and OpenFPGAs.
  • Graphic design tools for Open Source FPGAs (Presentation , Video )
  • Funny digital electronics with Open Source FPGAs (Presentation, Video )

• New IceStudio 0.3.2-beta is available.
  • It is including Tiny FPGA support along other things.
  • We are in release process but beta is available now.

• Enrollment to  Obijuan’s Jedi Academy is closed until next season. Tutorial is at  at 25% and we are 134 participants.
• We had our first “Rural Technology Visit” at Mareldem.

• Franky was born … and replicated a lot of times

• Workshop: How to design in 3D with FreeCad.  Juan González Gómez at CTIFMadridCap.
• New web(*)

(*) One change was the newsletter tool. We hope that works and all of you get notified.

Esperamos con impaciencia la llegada del 2018 y deseando seguir contando con todos vosotros en nuestra aventura con las OpenFPGA !

Muchas gracias y un abrazo muy fuerte a todos !!!

With every batch we have been adding a modification to our Logo. This time we want to add another element from Granada. The  idea is to add a cypress, but we are open to other  suggestions. You can participate designing it, send us your draft  !!

Thank you very much for following us in this exciting adventure.

Weren’t amazing the  first three chapter’s of Obijuan tutorial? Here we are dealing with “bitpoints‘ trying to become Master Jedi. Very fun to participate and see all of you/us in Twitter , Google+ and rest of media.

Eladio is getting pressure, he has started working on the next batch of the Alhambra boards, but this time the pick&place will happen in house ! Big step forward increasing our capability to produce high quality HW. There are 40 boards left from current batch. Amazing, thank you to all of you.

We also want to welcome our new members from other countries outside Europe:  Chile, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, USA, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. We know shipments take longer that what we would like. We will work to  improve this and get better and quicker.

And what about Jesus and the rest of participants that released IceStudio 0.3.1-rc (release candidate). This tool is a breaker, is the beginning of doing things differently.

These are all events that have happened during these past months:

• Keynote en las Jornadas de la Universidad de Málaga
• Laboratorio Opensource y electrónica digital en TEDxValladolid  (Photo)
• Charla FPGAs libres en la Universidad de La Rioja  (Video)
• Charla en el congreso LibreCon, en Santiago de Compostela

And last but not less important lets mention some of the projects that the community has done:

• Juanma Rico and his PONG game
• Julian Caro Linares and the RAM block
• Obijuan y el conversor AD interno

Finally, behind all this work there are some more people behind the scenes, they are receiving your mails, packaging, shipping,…  Maria, Maria Luisa, Antonio and Andres.

Academia Jedi :  “May the force be with you”

For those of you that wants to start working on the Alhambra as soon as possible take a look to this WorkShop.

During these past weeks we have seen good projects with the Alhambra board , some of them done by our first users:

1. Monster LED: Transform your VGA monitor into  a huge LCD.

We hope you enjoy your AlhambraBits as we do with ours.

Regards

1. There was a “Surprise Party” for Obijuan in MakerSpace Madrid. Amazing initiative from his followers.
2. New presentations / workshops  were done:
   1. May 20th: Murcia Meetup: Lattuino pictures
   2. June 1st: Fuerteventura makers
   3. July 6th: Universidad de Cantabria : Summer workshop
   4. July 8th: Workshop at Makerspace Madrid
   5. Eladio was interviewed by Rincon Ingenieril …
   6. … and participate in  “Meeting with Scientist” event at “Parque de las Ciencias – Granada”
3. First PrintBots with Open FPGA were born
4. We had a rural meeting in Pinos del Valle ! Jesus couldn’t join  us but next time we will try to meet the four of us together.
5. Delivery of batch2-second part was complete.

And the future is bringing us more good news. We are almost to receive the third batch of boards. We will ship 240 units during September and hopefully we will have enough stock to cover Q4.

Areas where we are investing time are:

1. How to improve the manufacturing process. Eladio got his pick&place machine
2. Running Arduino inside the IceZum Alambra
3. Progress on the IceStudio IDE, planning new features for the next releases.
4. Alhambrabits organization under GitHub Alhambra-bits

But most important thing we were able to enjoy holidays and charge our batteries for the rest of the year. We hope you had the opportunity to do the same. We keep in touch, more news with batch 3.1 coming soon

La Herradura – Granada – Spain (Aug-2017)

Once this is complete , we will start a new manufacturing batch that will be ready by September. While this happens, we will keep working adding more documentation and HowTo.

Thank you all of you for your support.

• FPGAWars
• CloneWars
• PrintBots
• OpenScan, FreeCad, Icestudio video tutorials
• … and much more even before all these above projects (IEARobotics)…

But, not only that, Alhambra second-batch-part1 started shipping last week, and this week we are sending the emails to the people that asked for one (Second-batch-part2 May2017).

Workshops and talks have continued happening. Right now we are covering Spain since this trend started there. But we hope to be soon everywhere.

• Reset. ETSII, UPM

• Malakabot 17

• IES Juan de la Cierva: Electrónica digital divertida con FPGAs libres

Finally, we want to say to all of you that are supporting us, following us in the media, doing your contributions to the project and , of course, buying our hardware and following our courses.

Thank you from all AlhambraBits team !!