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.<p>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.
I was looking for a cheap (< $30) board to start playing with FPGAs and found this one. It's a good improvement over the v2 that had some signal issues[0]. The examples also include a RISC-V core.<p>[0]: <a href="https://tinyvision.ai/blogs/processing-at-the-edge/ground-trampolines-and-phase-locked-loops" rel="nofollow">https://tinyvision.ai/blogs/processing-at-the-edge/ground-tr...</a>
I love the emphasis on breaking out all of the GPIO pins, it is incredible today how many dev boards either leave pins as not connected or hard wire them (no jumper to disable) to some onboad peripheral. Looking at you stm32 discovery boards...
Not to snipe this post or anything, but you can get a Xilinx zynq 7000/7010 on Aliexpress for ~$20 right now (likely old bitcoin mining boards being tossed).
How about an FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple (or not really), supported by OSS toolchain and can emulate a RISC-V SoC with performance sufficient to run a fully-functional Linux desktop?<p>I once stumbled upon an article where somebody FPGA-ed (with a much bigger board, I don't insist it has to be this small and simple) a RISC-V system to make a "RISC-V PC" and I'm thinking about getting an FPGA to explore that since then.
There's plenty of such boards these days.<p>I generally recommend the iCESugar and the ULX3S, for iCE40 (UP5K) and ECP5 respectively.<p>I own both boards, and a few more I don't feel like recommending.
FPGA Thread: Bluespec SystemVerilog is now completely open source, very nice HDL although quite opinionated.<p><a href="https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc</a><p><i>it's Haskell underneath</i> (<a href="https://xkcd.com/356/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/356/</a>)
It is interesting that the github does not mention that this FPGA chip is optimized for ML inference. Or is sold as such at least:<p><a href="https://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/FPGAandCPLD/iCE40UltraPlus" rel="nofollow">https://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/FPGAandCPLD/iCE40Ult...</a><p>I am not versed enough in FPGA to know if this is just a marketing rebranding of common features (apparently a focus on LUTs and add-and-multiply operations) or if it is an actual edge.<p>Though, if that thing can do pattern recognition in images and draws 10 mA max, that's an interesting package for $24
How does this compare to alternatives for learning FPGA? What's the significance of the <i>duino</i> suffix?<p>When would you choose FPGA over something like an STM32? From what an internet search leads to, they can be faster / do more things in parallel for the price. And you can add capabilities (More timers? More op amps?) with firmware updates. Is this at the core of when you'd choose one?<p>I've no experience with FPGA, but would like to learn. This is listed as "no longer available for sale". Which dev board do you recommend? Thank you.
Here's the board I still have from my student years. I'm curious how it compares to modern alternatives? I haven't kept up with that field at all:<p><a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147963601.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147963601.pdf</a>
There's also this FPGA board and I think you can order it already: <a href="https://ulx3s.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ulx3s.github.io/</a><p>The ULX3S FPGA board has the Lattice ECP5 FPGA, and an ESP32 that connects to wifi and can reprogram the FPGA.
Really neat. I've been looking for something like this to try out open source FPGA development tools, just wish it came with a usb-c port instead of micro.
I had fun playing with the Lattice ICE40 Ultra Plus Breakout board.<p>I wouldn't call it expensive (~$60) and it's pretty simple.<p>The toolchain by Lattice however is not the best