I am amazed at the popularity of FPGA in this Project14 poll. Considering how much time, money and effort it takes to do an FPGA project, there must be a bunch of people already high up the learning curve with mostly complete projects already on the go. I am curious to know what projects people had in mind when voting for this category. I guess if it gets selected we will find out.
In my case, music, to answer your 'what project' question. The Uno was seriously under-powered for the music box thing I did last year. It wouldn't take much to implement the same thing in hardware on an FPGA. (I wasn't thinking of a complicated SoC part - that would be too much money and effort - just the Lattice Brevia board I have, with maybe an interface through SPI to a Uno.) Time to hack it up probably wouldn't be any longer than I spent doing the Arduino stuff and I already have the bits so no expense, unless I wanted to be a bit more ambitious and put a proper codec on it on a daughterboard for better quality on the output audio.
I presume that the Cypress PSoC parts count as programmable logic too, so the bar to entry isn't all that high if anyone wanted to go that route.
In my case, music, to answer your 'what project' question. The Uno was seriously under-powered for the music box thing I did last year. It wouldn't take much to implement the same thing in hardware on an FPGA. (I wasn't thinking of a complicated SoC part - that would be too much money and effort - just the Lattice Brevia board I have, with maybe an interface through SPI to a Uno.) Time to hack it up probably wouldn't be any longer than I spent doing the Arduino stuff and I already have the bits so no expense, unless I wanted to be a bit more ambitious and put a proper codec on it on a daughterboard for better quality on the output audio.
I presume that the Cypress PSoC parts count as programmable logic too, so the bar to entry isn't all that high if anyone wanted to go that route.
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