25 Apr
2013
25 Apr
'13
8:18 p.m.
On Apr 25, 2013, at 9:28 PM, Jim Stephens wrote:
My main target is the PDP 11, but hopefully will pick
up some tools and learn something in the process.
Definitely! FPGAs (and programmable logic in general) are a lot
of fun despite the somewhat steep learning curve. It's really
hard to find GOOD FPGA programmers out there (we usually run
into software people who have been unwillingly shoehorned into
FPGA dev and treat it like a CPU, so don't make that mistake),
so if you get good at it, it can make you some real money. Lots
of money to be made cleaning up after bad FPGA programmers, if
my job is any indication.
But yeah, have fun. There are SO MANY nice FPGA boards, mostly
from Digilent and Terasic, that are aimed at hobbyists
(maybe
ones with slightly deep pockets sometimes) and have a lot of
fun interfaces to play with. I made a VGA controller for my
Terasic DE1 that generated a colorized "munching squares"
display at 640x480, and it came in under 100 LEs (less than 1%
of the 25K LE FPGA). Really fun to see what you can get away
with, just like logic on a PCB!
- Dave