alt Hacker News> I don’t understand what point you’re trying to get across.
My point is twofold:
1. There are many niches. Your main needs are not the same as my main needs. And my needs are poorly met by existing products, so I want to see something better. (And I do buy chips.)
2. All of this is way, way harder than it needs to be. It could be easy, but it isn't. Everything is possible right now. But I wasn't random when I used the dreaded A-word ("Arduino"). Arduino is a kind of horrible product that did not make anything possible and did not really invent anything. It did not make anything really hard suddenly become easy. Hard things before Arduino were still hard after Arduino. It "just" made some things that used to be medium-hard pains-in-the-butt actually really quick and easy (at a little backend complexity cost: now you've got the Arduino IDE around, hope it doesn't break!).
It turns out that is very valuable.
And is what I would like to see happen with FPGAs: make them easy to drop in instead of pains in the butt. All pieces for this exist, nothing is new tech, no major revolutions need to happen. "Just" ease of use.
Replies
> make them easy to drop in instead of pains in the butt
How much easier does it need to be than putting down a single 1mm^2 LDO and a QFN IC? Is this really that difficult?
> (at a little backend complexity cost: now you've got the Arduino IDE around, hope it doesn't break!)
Doesn't really matter if it does break; just use gcc and a Makefile like you would for any other firmware.
You probably want to replace the Arduino libraries with your own ones eventually anyway, because there's so much cruft in there that you're never going to use.
> It did not make anything really hard suddenly become easy.
It did. Onboarding people onto embedded programmer.
You just ran it, wrote few lines and you had working blinky. Write some more and you have useful toy. You could even technically make products with it but going from this to C++ was easier coz you already know what you could do, just needed to go thru pain of switching the toolchain once you're already invested.
Compare that to "you need to setup compiler, toolchain, SDK, figure out how to program the resulting binary, map the registers to your devboard pins etc."