Learn FPGAs With a $25 Board and Open Source Tools

An anonymous reader writes: Hackaday has a 3 part tutorial with videos of using open source tools with a cheap ($25) FPGA board. The board isn't very powerful, but this could be the 'gateway drug' to FPGAs for people who don't want to spend hundreds of dollars and install 100s of megabytes of software and license keys just to get their feet wet. The videos are particularly good--like watching them over their shoulder. As far as I know, this is the only totally open source FPGA toolchain out there.

Comments

fpga4fun

[TeknoHog]

I didn't read the summary or the article, but I see these comments about overwhelming toolchains. To me, the important bit is understanding some general concepts (it helps to have some electronics experience first) and the language (Verilog is probably easier than VHDL). Fpga4fun and its tutorials were a great introduction to these.

For those of you who think FPGAs are a waste of time compared to small/fast/low-power CPUs, there are plenty of reasons to learn them anyway. The key idea is that you design your own circuit, instead of running your code on someone else's CPU design. If you have any electronics background, you'll appreciate the idea of basically writing your circuits in code, instead of the painstaking and error-prone manual assembly. It really bridges the gap between software and hardware in many ways.

One interesting side effect to me is that FPGAs helped me write and understand parallel code better. In an FPGA, you often write genuinely parallel circuitry, and you need extra care and thought to make it work at all. That kind of thinking will carry over to your software projects too.