Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools

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.

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.