Here's how I got my feet wet with RISC-V, for next to nothing:
- I bought a cheap FPGA board. Pretty much anything is large enough for a low performance RISC-V CPU.
- I added a small design with a picorv32 CPU and experimented with that first.
- I designed my own little RISC-V CPU. I've designed digital hardware for decades, and I've learned all about CPUs in college etc, it was still eye opening to actually design one myself.
- I write blog posts about all the hobby stuff that I do now. I never did that before, and I'm not looking for a large audience or anything. But what I discovered is that I learn way more about a subject when I write about it: a major part of it is that I want to avoid public embarrassment about writing something wrong. :-) By writing about it, I have to understand things better than when I don't.
This may not be the best route for those who don't already have a hardware background, but there are various open source tools now with make it accessible to hobbyists as well.
>"I write blog posts about all the hobby stuff that I do now."
What is your blog? I would be interested in reading how you designed your own RISC-V chip.
>"This may not be the best route for those who don't already have a hardware background, but there are various open source tools now with make it accessible to hobbyists as well."
Can you recommend some of those open source tools that would aid in learning for people who don't already have hardware backgrounds?
> Can you recommend some of those open source tools that would aid in learning for people who don't already have hardware backgrounds?
I haven't played with them myself, but LiteX and FuseSoC are things to look into.
There is now also a whole fully open source tool suite to go from RTL (Verilog) all the way to a compiled bitstream for Lattice iCE40 and ECP5 FPGAs. That's not necessarily for beginners though.
- I bought a cheap FPGA board. Pretty much anything is large enough for a low performance RISC-V CPU.
- I added a small design with a picorv32 CPU and experimented with that first.
- I designed my own little RISC-V CPU. I've designed digital hardware for decades, and I've learned all about CPUs in college etc, it was still eye opening to actually design one myself.
- I write blog posts about all the hobby stuff that I do now. I never did that before, and I'm not looking for a large audience or anything. But what I discovered is that I learn way more about a subject when I write about it: a major part of it is that I want to avoid public embarrassment about writing something wrong. :-) By writing about it, I have to understand things better than when I don't.
This may not be the best route for those who don't already have a hardware background, but there are various open source tools now with make it accessible to hobbyists as well.
It's been a very fun journey.