I voted FPGA because that's what I'd like to see. There's a possibility I might enter try and create something basic, but I'm new to programmable logic so it certainly wouldn't be anything impressive.
Actually, I am not that surprised that the FPGA is popular. The boards that are available today are quite cheap and the tools are getting better and easier to program with. I believe some of the FPGA issues seen recently have to do with them being embedded on another system that is not fully cooked such as the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 or use older tools such as Xilinx ISE.
The TinyFPGA is a good example of a simple and cheap FPGA.
I am a bit surprised also. I have not invested the time and effort to learn FPGAs so this would be a competition that I sit out. On the other hand, I have been following the growing popularity among hobbyists and would like to see projects where FPGA capability is required and a microcontroller and other parts would not suffice. So, should be interesting....
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.
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.
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