FPGA Advent Calendar

https://twitter.com/willflux/status/1465268154733637633

by hasheddan • 5 years ago

68 13 5 years ago

mysterydip2• 5 years ago

Some really neat stuff on there. My favorite is this minecraft clone on a tiny FPGA: https://github.com/nickmqb/fpga_craft

justwannalearn• 5 years ago

All that looks so fun! I'm in university right now and I have the means to do things - the uni provides an oscilloscope and a bunch of electronics free to use. I bought my own FPGA, but currently have no lecturers who know their way around them. I really want to do something cool with it, I've spent money on Udemy courses but everything is still so intimidating even after finishing them. I could at least interface with an i2c sensor. But man, even just a simple matrix multiplication module/architecture is beyond my means.

What should I do to learn so I can join in on making projects like in the FPGA Advent Calendar?

wrycoder2• 5 years ago

You need a solid background in digital electronics to start.

1. Nand2Tetris

2. Books:

The Art of Electronics, especially the last half.

Learning the Art of Electronics. Also especially the last half.

3. You should have a good understanding of programming in C.

vlovich123• 5 years ago

With FPGAs? It’s been a long time since college but I recall my FPGA experience being very much like programming once you realized all lines of code executed in parallel and “function” calls were just connecting wires. I don’t recall many issues. Maybe some things around synthesizability but I can’t recall anymore if this applied to FPGAs or just ASICs

mysterydip2• 5 years ago

May I also recommend this cheap but excellent logic analyzer: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077LSG5P2/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_... That combined with the open source PulseView software (https://www.sigrok.org/wiki/PulseView) has been invaluable with my debugging.

anfractuosity2• 5 years ago

I found playing with ws2811 lights fun with an FPGA. I created a little double buffer in BRAM and was going to build an SPI interface to drive them via a Pi, which I need to get round to.

niccl• 5 years ago

I think the key to learning FPGAs, as in most other languages, is to find a small project that really grabs you and blunder along with that until you've got something that works. Then you realise how you'd do it better and what you don't know and ...

For me and FPGA's it came out of a friend asking why you have 12 semitones in a scale, and what would happen if you had 13. The idea of a polyphonic synth with 13 semitones in a scale was born. That led to trying to understand clocks, dividers, metastability on inputs, synthesis for testing and test rigs, simple DAC and all sorts that I can't recall now.

And 13 semitones in a musical scale is a really dumb idea. A great way to twist the head of musician friends but dumb...

dtgriscom• 5 years ago

And 13 semitones in a musical scale is a really dumb idea.

But, now you know that for sure!

progbits• 5 years ago

Really cool stuff there, this can satisfy my rabbit hole needs for the next month :)

BTW, slightly better UX here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1465268154733637633.html

WillFlux2• 5 years ago

Twitter thread author here. If this inspires you to learn more about FPGAs:

1. Recommended FPGA Sites: https://projectf.io/recommended-fpga-sites/

2. Project F: https://projectf.io/sitemap/

3. Project F GitHub: https://github.com/projf/projf-explore

anfractuosity2• 5 years ago

I really like Hamsterworks too - https://web.archive.org/web/20191020204100/http://www.hamste... shame it's only on archive.org now :(

WillFlux2• 5 years ago

Yes. Hamsterworks is a great resource. I learnt a fair bit from this site when I started with FPGAs. I'll add the archived version to my recommended resources page.

FPGA Advent Calendar

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