Low-budget, Open Source VGA Video Card Being Created

A low budget, open source, VGA compatible video card is under serious development by Michael Meeuwisse and a few contributors. The goal of "Project VGA" is to create a video card that's under $294, or 200 Euros. If everything goes well, you could buy one of these cards from the Wacco Webstack site, owned by Michael Meeuwise.

The idea behind the project came from the desire to play with programmable hardware combined with the goals set up by the Open Graphic Project (which develops graphics cards with the published specifications and open source drivers). At this moment, the schematic of the video card is finished, created with Cadsoft Eagle. The circuit board is still in the "work in progress" phase and will appear in a few weeks on the Wacco Webstack website. Some good news for the developers: the first working cards should be available for you in December.

The low cost card is made from these components: PCI bus interface, Xilinx Spartan 3 S400 FPGA, 16MB SDRAM and an onboard programmer with USB interface. The components for one card cost somewhere around 70 Euros, that's $103.

The project started with basic VGA capabilities (640x480 resolution, displaying the BIOS boot screen etc.), the next step will be the development of a custom driver, adding 2D. If more people participate in "Project VGA", 3D might get included on the card. Although, if there are too many things gathered on the card, another version of it might be created, with different specifications.

Everything related to the project is released under the "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License", aiming for GPL, without turning the graphics card into a commercial product, because the subject is hardware designs, not software. The schematic is available on the developer's website, as well as a list with all the components necessary to build the device.