Hello everyone!

We have lots of news to share.

New Systems Ported: Silice, Sega Master System, and Litex

Lately, we’ve been working on porting new systems to the Icepi Zero. First of all, we’ve added support for the Icepi on Silice! Silice is a easy-to-use HDL, that allows you to prototype ideas quickly and then refine designs to be compact and efficient. They also provide tons of demo projects, like the Fire-V RV32I RISC-V core:

This core is currently running with a 90 MHz CPU and 135 MHz SDRAM, which can be overclocked to higher frequencies. Check out its upstream source! (PR being made soon.)

The Sega Master System now also runs on the Icepi Zero! You can load your favourite rom over wi-fi with a Pi Zero and play to your heart’s content via a USB keyboard or gamepad:

We have also ported Litex to the Icepi, Now, you can run a full Linux system with linux-on-litex-vexriscv on a 32-bit RISC-V core on this tiny handheld FPGA:

Free Icepis for Teenagers

Recently, we worked together with Hackclub, a non-profit that encourages teenagers to code, to offer an Icepi Zero as one of the prizes for their Summer of Making event.

Teenagers (ages ≤ 18) can code on their favourite projects, earn shells, and exchange them for prizes. With ~16h of coding, teens can get a Icepi Zero in their hands without spending a penny! (PCB design is also allowed) This is a great way to get teens to learn coding while recieving something cool. There have already been multiple Icepi Zero prizes awarded!

CE & UKCA Certifications

Great news! All the documentation for CE and UKCA certification has been submitted and validated! This means that the Icepi Zeros will be able to be shipped to the EU and UK without issue. The boards now have the UKCA and CE marks affixed:

Thank you very much for your support. We are looking forward to shipping your boards and seeing what you do with them soon, but for now keep spreading the word about Icepi Zero and the world of open source FPGAs. Until our next update!