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Nice. Adding this to my watch list. Another project I've been looking into is the snickerdoodle.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle

It's been taking quite a long time to deliver many of the parts, unfortunately. I was watching it for a time but a lot of newer boards seem to be coming out and at this point unless you need the extended addons, you may be able to get more for less.

The snickerdoodle is probably better if you want to do a lot of electronic breakout. Otherwise, for straight FPGA work, at this rate, the new Avnet Ultra96 simply looks like a superior base platform in most respects, and will be shipping in volume quite soon.

The Snickerdoodle got a lot of attention for its price point (which turned out to be unrealistically low... I commend them for following through though). It's an odd platform. They were going for an ecosystem of carrier boards, but ended up with 0.050" pitch connectors. Which are good if you've got flying leads, but I can't see myself using a Zynq for that kind of work. The mating connectors are ~$7 in small quantities which is comparable to the smaller, tighter pitch connectors other dev boards use, so there isn't really a cost savings if you build your own plug-in boards. It might even cost more for wide I/O in terms of connectors and board space.

You're right that technology has continued to march along. $250 for a Zynq Ultrascale is very tempting, but I have enough dev boards collecting dust...

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