[katastic]

My problem (years ago) was that with Lattice, there just aren't as many tutorials/easy-EDA and they kind of expect you to know what you're doing.

So if you've never taken a class on FPGA's and learned how netlists work, et al, Lattice may be a harder time. I ended up buying a cheap Altera afterward just to learn.

[bri3d]

I entirely see where you're coming from, and this has completely changed in the last 2-3 years. SiliconBlue/Lattice used to be a niche-market low-power also ran in the FPGA world. Documentation was sparse and most examples from academia targeted Altera or Xilinx parts.

The open-source toolchain flipped this and allowed Lattice FPGAs to become the tool of choice for beginners and small-application hobbyists. There's now a tremendous wealth of resource available around getting started with Lattice FPGAs. And as the cherry on top, you don't have to wrangle the gigantic Vivado/Quartus/ISE suites to do so.

[nmz787]

I think that's solved now though, at least for a few ICs and toolchains, via things like MyHDL and/or rhea (tldr; Python wrappers) and websites like fpga4fun.com