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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.
these analogies have to have a point, don't they?
GP indeed misses the point, and probably didn't realize how close he got. What's really killing the FPGA is the Raspberry Pi and similar SoC-based SBC's. A RPi running Linux has much better I/O than an FPGA, is much faster, and is far easier to program and debug. Of course, running Linux to do some bitbanging is spectacularly inefficient from a technical viewpoint, but economically the RPi wins.
There's a reason you see the fast shift to FPGA's with hard cores : it's the only viable approach. Use a small FPGA for the few algorithms that are troublesome on a straightforward CPU design, put the 98% of support logic in software.