The Papilio DUO – which recently made its Kickstarter debut – is equipped with both an FPGA and Atmel’s ATmega32U4 microcontroller (MCU).

According to Papilio rep Jack Gassett, the board allows Makers and devs to easily draw circuits, move pins, connect extra serial ports and even link a Bitcoin miner to the ATmega32U4.

“The Papilio DUO is much more than just a hardware project. In fact, the software is the secret sauce that sets the DUO apart from other FPGA boards. It lets you draw up circuits without investing time and energy in learning VHDL/Verilog,” Gassett explained.

“We start with the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and supercharge it by adding circuits into the mix. We bring all of the pieces needed to draw and debug your very own circuits in one place. It’s an easy and seamless user experience that we call Papilio DesignLab for use with both Windows and Linux.”

Aside from Atmel’s ATmega32U4 microcontroller, key hardware specs include:

Spartan 6 LX9 FPGA

High efficiency LTC3419 switching voltage regulator

Dual channel FTDI FT2232H USB 2.0 interface

512KB or 2MB ISSI IS61WV5128 SRAM

64Mbit Macronix MX25L6445 SPI Flash

4 I/O pins arranged in an Arduino-compatible mega form factor

Digital pins 0-16 connected to FPGA and ATmega32U4

It should be noted that the Papilio team is also offering a classic computing shield that provides the necessary hardware to recreate classic computing systems on the board, such as:

socz80: Z80 Retro MicroComputer

ZX Spectrum

Commodore VIC20

LadyBug Hardware

Jet Set Willy on ZPUino

Bomb Jack

Sega Master System

All Classic Arcade Games at Papilio Arcade

Interested in learning more? You can check out Papilio DUO’s official Kickstarter page here.