They are FPGA development boards. In simple words, they are similar to microcontrollers like an Arduino, but allows you to design hardware (flip-flops/registers, combinatorial logic, PLLs, DMAs, etc.) using blocks or description language. You can actually design your own microcontroller on one of these boards. Great for rapid prototyping or working with anything that requires low-latency and speed.
I'm kind of tempted. I work professionally with Xilinx FPGAs and it would be fun to have one of these for a hobby project. The problem is that I'm not really sure why I would use this for a hobby project instead of something like a Raspberry Pi. Why write Verilog when I can write Python or C++?
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11-14-2023 at 12:21 PM.
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from BraveStraw696
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what's this?
They are FPGA development boards. In simple words, they are similar to microcontrollers like an Arduino, but allows you to design hardware (flip-flops/registers, combinatorial logic, PLLs, DMAs, etc.) using blocks or description language. You can actually design your own microcontroller on one of these boards. Great for rapid prototyping or working with anything that requires low-latency and speed.
They are FPGA development boards. In simple words, they are similar to microcontrollers like an Arduino, but allows you to design hardware (flip-flops/registers, combinatorial logic, PLLs, DMAs, etc.) using blocks or description language. You can actually design your own microcontroller on one of these boards. Great for rapid prototyping or working with anything that requires low-latency and speed.
I think raspberry Pi tasted better and has more HDMI.
I'm kind of tempted. I work professionally with Xilinx FPGAs and it would be fun to have one of these for a hobby project. The problem is that I'm not really sure why I would use this for a hobby project instead of something like a Raspberry Pi. Why write Verilog when I can write Python or C++?
FPGA board is whole different level than raspberry pi. It has much more freedom but much more difficult to use. Not mentioning how terrible their designing software is
They are FPGA development boards. In simple words, they are similar to microcontrollers like an Arduino, but allows you to design hardware (flip-flops/registers, combinatorial logic, PLLs, DMAs, etc.) using blocks or description language. You can actually design your own microcontroller on one of these boards. Great for rapid prototyping or working with anything that requires low-latency and speed.
I'm kind of tempted. I work professionally with Xilinx FPGAs and it would be fun to have one of these for a hobby project. The problem is that I'm not really sure why I would use this for a hobby project instead of something like a Raspberry Pi. Why write Verilog when I can write Python or C++?
Depends on the hobby project. If you've got a need for high speed ADCs or DACs, the serializers/deserializers capabilities on are unparalleled. But for most home projects, you're right. Arduinos and pis would solve that. I mainly use mine to rapid prototype and test ideas.
FPGA board is whole different level than raspberry pi. It has much more freedom but much more difficult to use. Not mentioning how terrible their designing software is
It does have lots of options and a few small bugs here and there but I would say it's far from terrible. Comparing Altera and Xilinx, I think Xilinx does a pretty good job on the software side. The synthesizer is optimized well and for the most part, behaves as expected. You're right though, the learning curve is much larger than that of a raspberry pi, especially when you get into metastability issues.
I should start a business buying circuit boards from China (ones that would be used in cheap mini PCs) and market them as Python programmer developer boards.
I'm kind of tempted. I work professionally with Xilinx FPGAs and it would be fun to have one of these for a hobby project. The problem is that I'm not really sure why I would use this for a hobby project instead of something like a Raspberry Pi. Why write Verilog when I can write Python or C++?
Cuz synthesizing a circuit or microarchitecture(+software) is different than making a software.
It does have lots of options and a few small bugs here and there but I would say it's far from terrible. Comparing Altera and Xilinx, I think Xilinx does a pretty good job on the software side. The synthesizer is optimized well and for the most part, behaves as expected. You're right though, the learning curve is much larger than that of a rape pi, especially when you get into metastability issues.
Not to mention the fact that each manufacturer has their own set of proprietary tools vs most software development. Also the builds take far longer to complete and you need a powerful machine with lots of memory (good luck to everyone interested in ultrascale+ development who just bought the shiny new MacBook pro 8GB). Terrible is subjective but proprietary and slow aren't great characteristics.
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Cuz synthesizing a circuit or microarchitecture(+software) is different than making a software.
you can still use systemC or Python to write HDL.