Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperman1 | Hacker News Reader

While these things seem fun to play with, what are fun projects to actually do with them? I'd buy one, but I know a few people who have one, garhering dust.

View on HN

Anything that would make a fun ASIC could be turned into an FPGA project. Something like Ben Eater's GPU project, which he did on a breadboard, could be implemented on them, or you could make a toy CPU with RISC-V, or create a softcore (faster than a software-simulated, slower than actual hardware) version of any number of older processors.

Edit: Link to Ben's GPU project: https://eater.net/vga

I have an FPGA and I've loaded up a sample that outputs a VGA signal[0] but the output is only based on hardwired patterns, not driving by a frame buffer or CPU. I'm not sure where to go next in order to use the memory chip on the dev board (I have the Digilent Arty [1] as well as a MiSTer FPGA setup) or have some sort of frame buffer which I can use with a CPU that is also running in the FPGA. I'm 90% through building Ben Eater's 8 bit cpu on breadboards (just have to add the control logic) and I did the 65C02 project of his just before that, so I'm definitely in the market for learning where to go next with it. My dream is to have a computer that I have completely design control over :)

[0] https://digilent.com/reference/learn/programmable-logic/tuto... specifically

[1] https://digilent.com/reference/programmable-logic/arty/refer...

I think a fun project would be to emulate old computers (i.e. i486, Sgis, SUNs)

You can find links to a lot of old computers and game consoles implemented in FPGA here: - https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki/Cores

I habe a few lying about. My fun project is to implement a usb CCID (smartcard) device to create a pkcs11comiant HSM from scratch (FYI the ESA dis this on MAX10s for one of their satellites or probes). Assuming you dev environment is not compromised. USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 have free/OSS IP cores.

Personally, I do not see point in implementing a softcore Cpu unless design absolutely requires it.

Separately, FPGA makers has shifted focus a bit from facilitating hardware design to providing coprocessors/accel cards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com