blackSparrow

Also found some great stuff at thedatabus.io

But then there's so many others like me who don't give a damn about these points, mostly because they mean very less in this community. Yes, you could collect more points by writing smarter factual stuff but the same can also be done by writing stuff that appeals to a certain section of the people and these people have the loudest voices (mostly active on the site).

I'm new to HN though and I'm curious if someone can change my mind.

The first thing one needs to understand is that FPGAs are highly specialised tools. They're only used in cases where extraordinary performance is required, more than what processors can provide, just because there are tools nowadays that let you print hello world doesn't mean it's a good idea. The entire thought process behind digital design is very different from that of programming.

I'm all for cheap stuff for beginners but what good is an fpga board without a lot of peripherals? I mean the whole point of dumping your design into an actual fpga is to see it doing something. If I were just learning to desing, doing so would be very much possible in the software tools itself, if I'm able to succesfully go upto bitstream generation without errors and meet timing, it means my design is going to work on a physical board too. I'm open to changing my opinion on this though.

If you're talking about people who already know atleast one of digital design or firmware design (writing bare metal drivers etc) then your advice makes sense. But if I were a beginner trying to understand how digital logic design works, the whole Processor + Programmable logic and the complex interfaces between them can overwhelm me and take me away from exploring the base digital logic that is implemented. It will be a much more enjoyable experience to create something in the programmable fabric first and then think about how you can interface it with normal software.

Well comparing the FPGA world to the programming world cannot get any meaningless. If you read up about the state of HLS tools as of today, you will find enough experts telling you that they're nowhere near finding actual use in the industry, most of them only end up taking away the control you have over the design and all of them use way more resources when implemented than HDLs.

On the other end you have beginners asking stupid questions like 'okay how do I print hello world using python on this FPGA?' instead of thinking about the digital logic design that goes into it. Which is why I discourage the beginners from using anything but HDLs.

If anything HLS can be a good tool for professionals who already know what they're doing and understand what they're giving up by using an inherently sequential (programming) language to model inherently parallel hardware. They are in a position to use it as a tool to rapidly prototype their design and make incremental improvements thereafter, not beginners.

This article aims to guide you in your search for a suitable FPGA development board which can often lead to you pulling your hair out!