Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. It's a complex topic that takes a long time to learn and use effectively. It costs plenty of money. We don't need a site on development kits aimed at practitioners to explain the basics of what they are. We have other sites for that.

View on HN

> It costs plenty of money.

Not for the entry level. The Icestorm [1] tools are free software, in every sense of the word, and can take you all the way from Verilog source (or VHDL using GHDL's analyser [2]) to a bitstream. An associated board, such as an iCEstick or iCE40-HX8K, costs $40 downwards. (Cheap enough that a friendly sales rep. gave me one for free on request.)

[1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

[2] https://github.com/tgingold/ghdlsynth-beta

The project is about AWS's using high-end FPGA's. It's going to assume they have money and already learned the stuff since they pay as they go. Whereas, for a page on introducing FPGA's, what you referenced would be good stuff to have on it. Especially in addition to Spartan boards or list of cheap kits.

Again, this isn't an introduction.

Just wanted to make it clear to the casual reader, who was considering learning about FPGAs, that "plenty of money" doesn't have to be the case. It would be a pity if we lost a newbie :-)

$150 should get you a half decent board with all kinds of interesting IO options and a free toolchain.

And if that's too much, there are boards like this: https://www.amazon.com/RioRand-EP2C5T144-Altera-Cyclone-Deve...

Together with a $10 USB dongle, you can get going for $35.

It's still big enough to store small CPUs etc. A lot of fun!

Now now, don't be talking about how things are fun and might appeal to newbies or children. Gatekeeping is Serious Business and is not a fit subject for play or enjoyment.

The iCEstick is probably quite useful for general-purpose hardware interfacing tasks, etc but I doubt you'll be doing much in the way of FPGA compute on one of those.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com