Comment by wkoszek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wkoszek | Hacker News Reader

Good place to start this would be here:

https://github.com/wkoszek/freebsd_netfpga

https://wiki.freebsd.org/FPGA/

https://www.freshports.org/devel/xc3sprog/

It's a FreeBSD NetFPGA driver for an older 1G card that I wrote during my internship 8 years ago, and a little ecosystem to make development more functional. I could program the FPGA from the FreeBSD and synthesize the code on FreeBSD that time.

What you say is very hard, though. Speeds which are achieved with modern ASICs are hard to compete with, because ASICs do a lot of advanced stuff with DMAs, interrupts, checksum offloading. This might be doable with an expensive hardware, but nobody in DYI community has money to do this.

Additionally the tools for synthesis are proprietary, and everything touching FPGA is pretty much proprietary too. Looking into date/author of the synthesis is as far as I could get:

https://github.com/wkoszek/libxbf

(can only open file and tell you where the bitstream starts; not what it actually is) So the road to complete freedom goes through ASIC world, in my opinion.

Great list.

I have Bunnie's awesome Novena, which came with an FPGA (as well as an SDR add-on).

But, as the article says "FPGA development has always been an industrial activity, dominated by brutalist, opaque, and proprietary tools."... I haven't found the FPGA-FOR-DUMMIES guide to help me do anything with the thing.

Do you think there's a market for an FPGA-based tutorials?

I think I have a good grasp of stuff necessary for this, but I always felt that it's a really niche business, even within the DYI/open-source community.

If you want to start doing anything, I found it's best to look at the popularity of the board. S3E Starter Kit is by far the best, since most of the people could afford it, and it's nicely support. Any other board: case by case basis.

Realistically no.

However, I doubt many folks predicted the wild popularity of Arduino or Rpi either. All it takes is for some cool applications. The price point isn't a huge barrier these days.

I keep hoping some post-grad will come up with a great DUMMIES like guide that covers Hello World to signal processing.

Author here, that is precisely the point of Blinklight (the site this blog post is from) :)

It starts from the absolute beginning, and the tools and tutorials are web-based and integrated with each other:

https://www.blinklight.io

The focus is from Hello World to personal computer, but I've built a DSP-based guitar pedal in the past, and signal processing is really fun - I'd love to create a parallel learning path from Hello World to DSP at some point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com