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MAX ii Workbench for Education and Learning - MAXwel

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MAXwel is a cheap and simple FPGA development board made for educational purposes. It is based in a low-cost Altera MAX ii Chip (EPM240), containing 240 logic elements, 8Kbits of RAM and 32Kbits of flash memory. The board is equipped with 8 switches, 4 push-buttons, 16 LEDs (divided into rows A and B of 8 LEDs each) and four 7-segment displays. It also contains a 50MHz oscillator and a 14,7456 MHz oscillator as a clock source. The board is programmed through a USB Blaster JTAG interface with the pin-header located on the board.

Floorplan of the MAXwel board

Documentation

The User Manual can be found in the docs directory. It can be downloaded as a PDF and the LaTeX Source code is also available.

Template Project

Template projects for the Quartus IDE with already assigned Pins and other configuration provide a starting point for development:

An empty VHDL project
An empty Schematic project

More Project related Stuff

There are also some other Projects around the MAXwel board:

The Overlay is an open FPGA architecture for open tools and user designs that is intended to run on the MAX ii chip, in essence an "FPGA on a FPGA". It is not made for practical use cases outside of learning and experimentation.

Call for Participation

This project was never designed to be maintained by a single person. There are always going to be some housekeeping tasks to keep it up to date: Making sure, the documentation is right and contains the newest changes or fixing problems with the hardware or software. Maintaining this project can only be done with the help of other people. There are many ways you can contribute to this project. If you find a bug or a typo or parts of the documentation are not easy to understand and you have some questions: Feel free to create an Issue on GitHub or a Pull-Request containing a possible fix. I am glad about everybody contributing to this project.