Mercury FPGA Development Board

Mercury was a compact, low-cost FPGA development board in a breadboard-friendly DIP package. It was designed by myself and team of OU SECS alumni at MicroNova LLC, a company that we founded in May 2012. There wasn't a tiny, affordable FPGA module out there with all the features that we wanted, so we decided to make one ourselves! It combined a Xilinx Spartan-3A FPGA along with various support circuitry and peripherals into a 64-pin DIP package. I built some fun projects using Mercury including a Nixie clock and a Mandelbrot explorer.

We later created a Mercury Baseboard (carrier board adding seven-segment displays, switches, VGA, PS/2, etc.), Mercury II (an updated version using an Artix-7 FPGA), NovaVGA (an Arduino VGA shield based on a XC9572 CPLD), AmpliPi (an open-source Raspberry Pi-based audio amplifier), and also started to do some consulting work (which ended up being the only profitable aspect of the business.)

MicroNova LLC ultimately was not a great commercial success, but it was a fantastic learning experience. We gained a greater appreciation for the complexities of electronics manufacturing, and learned a lot about managing a small business – skills which would serve us well in future endeavors!