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Comment by vrangan | Hacker News Reader

I'm the author of the blog . Not trying to promote myself but since you posted, the v3 of the board is available on the tinyvision.ai and tindie stores. I discontinued v2 as it was a terrible design that I couldn't stand behind.

There are many reasons to learn about fpga's. Yes micros have their place as well and are very capable and cheap like the Nxp RT series.

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What's the best place to start learning about FPGAs? I've been wanting to dip my toes in, but not sure where to begin.

If you are already familiar with Python I could recommend start with this tutorial: https://github.com/RobertBaruch/nmigen-tutorial

Also, icestudio (https://icestudio.io/) is a gentle way to get introduced with minimal knowledge to the verilog side of things. As others have posted, the learning curve for HW can be steep and development tools tend to be in the dark ages as compared to those for SW development. eg. you will spend a lot of time hitting your head on a wall with debugging HW if you arent careful to follow a process of linting and simulating your design well before going to HW.

nMigen is highly recommended.

Excellent. Thanks to you both!

While it's not about FPGAs, I got started by working through https://www.nand2tetris.org/ . After that I bought an UPduino v2 and started hacking. Of course working on a fantasy CPU and a real FPGA are completely different, but the mindset of how hardware works vs. how software works is very valuable.

Can it run Linux? What comes close to beating the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W?

Not enough RAM. 640kB is actually enough for anyone as far as scalar variables in a single app are concerned so that’s what these small single task microcontrollers have.

> 640kB is actually enough for anyone

For a minute there I thought you were about to quote a certain Mr Gates...

But I'm now claiming "Mr Gates" to be the name of my first FPGA project

This gave me a good chuckle

It is an FPGA; it can run synchronous logic operations. This could include something like the encapsulation of an entire gate and circuit accurate simulation of an entire system of processors, memories, and interfaces, like say, a Super Nintendo (see MiSTer for more of this). This is a very different domain than a raspberry pi, and while the chip here lacks the resources to run something like MiSTer it will likely be used to run something like a microcontroller SoC with customizable peripherals. The $25 price point for everything and the kitchen sink is just right. The comparison to Arduino is much more apt than to the Pi.

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