here's to hoping! very good that they're trying to leverage public tooling/infrastructure. definitely an area that, with more competition, could reinvigorate & revitalize computing in powerful ways... especially if we start seeing more competition that also has high speed io too, imo, not quite present here at this ultra low price point.
the greenpak line seemed super super cool though. really cool ideas & products, way more mixed signal in a tiny cheap package than a classic fpga would have. i have little idea how capable or not it really is, given that it's a truly tiny product. but even if this never becomes a hundreds of cell line with decent io, it still feels like it has a ton going for it, and i hope it remains actively developed, very much, especially if communal tool chains get to play.
GCC brought good compilers out of the shackles of the proprietary world. Linux did the same for UNIX users. A few years later, Arduino did the same with micro controllers. Now is the time for FPGA.
Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light:
What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects.
I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so what sorts of things might low cost FPGAs be useful for in that realm?
I'm thinking of building a clock that integrates a local atomic oscillator, outputs from an embedded system running ntpd, and drives a local VFD as a sort of orientation project.
The single most popular hobby use case may be the Mister project for near perfect, super low latency retro gaming emulation.
Another common use case is real time video stream manipulation. There is a demo by Bunnie Huang who uses an fpga to intercept, decode, then reencode HDMI video streams (including microsecond timing manipulation of one of the data lines) in order to do video overlays on the video (for things like captions).
In general the main use cases are really for things that require lots of parallel and/or low latency processing.
Another quick idea is a cnc positioning stage that uses optical interfrerometry to measure distance moved. Really anything involving fast fringe counting in an interference pattern. It might be something like a new fringe for every micron of movement, so tracking something moving 1 m/s will require fringe counting at about 1 MHz, and the ADC sampling rate will need to be several times this in practice because errors are cumulative.
I'm using an ice40 FPGA to make a camera. It reads an image from an image sensor, writes it to an SDRAM, and then writes the SDRAM content to an SD card. Doing all that with a regular CPU would require lots of specialized peripherals (especially since the data rate is 1.2 Gbps -- 12 bits per pixel @ 100 MHz). An FPGA can handle all the requirements quite well.
If you are motivated by learning rather than practical usage, FPGAs are a great way to learn more about how things like CPUs or peripherals can be designed. It is also a way to understand how to evolve hardware and software at the same time.
Two examples that I have been loosely involved with;
* Google's CFU playground which is all about profiling and adding small number of new OpCodes to build an accelerator for a specific ML model (http://cfu-playground.rtfd.io/).
* The Fomu workshop (https://workshop.fomu.im) which walks though treating an FPGA like an embedded MCU where you can then modify the MCU!
After seeing some of the FPGA uses in research papers, I have no idea what the best uses are but I feel like we might on the edge of a revolution if enough people can get moderately powerful FPGAs on a $5 board.
[+] [-] rektide|4 years ago|reply
here's to hoping! very good that they're trying to leverage public tooling/infrastructure. definitely an area that, with more competition, could reinvigorate & revitalize computing in powerful ways... especially if we start seeing more competition that also has high speed io too, imo, not quite present here at this ultra low price point.
the greenpak line seemed super super cool though. really cool ideas & products, way more mixed signal in a tiny cheap package than a classic fpga would have. i have little idea how capable or not it really is, given that it's a truly tiny product. but even if this never becomes a hundreds of cell line with decent io, it still feels like it has a ton going for it, and i hope it remains actively developed, very much, especially if communal tool chains get to play.
[+] [-] Rochus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects.
I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so what sorts of things might low cost FPGAs be useful for in that realm?
I'm thinking of building a clock that integrates a local atomic oscillator, outputs from an embedded system running ntpd, and drives a local VFD as a sort of orientation project.
[+] [-] milesvp|4 years ago|reply
Another common use case is real time video stream manipulation. There is a demo by Bunnie Huang who uses an fpga to intercept, decode, then reencode HDMI video streams (including microsecond timing manipulation of one of the data lines) in order to do video overlays on the video (for things like captions).
In general the main use cases are really for things that require lots of parallel and/or low latency processing.
[+] [-] yummypaint|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johndoughy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mithro|4 years ago|reply
Two examples that I have been loosely involved with; * Google's CFU playground which is all about profiling and adding small number of new OpCodes to build an accelerator for a specific ML model (http://cfu-playground.rtfd.io/). * The Fomu workshop (https://workshop.fomu.im) which walks though treating an FPGA like an embedded MCU where you can then modify the MCU!
[+] [-] mithro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummypaint|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshspankit|4 years ago|reply