FreeCore Library
Prototype/Development board review:
Constellation FLEX 10K Development System
from Nova Engineering

The Constellation has been designed the way all high quality prototype development boards should have been designed in the first place: 6 layer PCB with separate ground/power and 4 signal layers. Lots of connectors with plenty of ground connections. No unnecessary rubbish like LED displays, buttons, beepers or bumpers. Just a simple board - ready to go. Plug it into your vero board or birds nest and start testing - without having to worry about electrical issues like ground planes, ground bounce, decoupling, noise, crosstalk and other nasty electrical stuff. At least not from the board itself.

How do you combine the simplicity of such a board with even more functionality? The Nova engineers have obviously been doing some thinking. By placing the connectors in the right places they also made it PC/104 (embedded PC ISA bus) compliant. The only extra they've added is a small MAX 7000 device to perform some address decoding - to help you configure the 10K device using software running on your PC. Of course, you can also configure the device using a configuration PROM or a download cable like BitBlaster or ByteBlaster. The Nova Engineers have wisely selected a 240-pin package as the target 10K device, since it is footprint compatible with devices ranging from the EPF10K20 and all the way up to the EPF10K100A.

I can only wholeheartedly recommend this board. It is designed like I would have wanted to design it myself. By engineers. For engineers. If you want more information or technical details, I suggest you go to Nova Engineering's web site, located at http://www.nova-eng.com/constellation.html/

October 20, 1997
Rune Baeverrud,

Last updated 28 Jul 1999 07:23