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by ozmaverick72 1864 days ago
The talk mentioned a number of small flag boards. Can someone recommended one of them to get started playing with fpgas ?
3 comments

Open synth/route stack supports Lattice iCE40 and ECP5 the best.

iCE40 are a relatively simple, cheap and easy to work with architecture with a focus on low power usage. iCESugar + nanoDLA (cheap sigrok-friendly logic analyzer) is a good cheap set to get started on FPGAs with. These are cheap on aliexpress.

ECP5 are much larger, much more complex and powerful enough to fit a whole computer (e.g. the minimig open Amiga implementation) in. I don't recommend going anywhere near this until you've already got started with iCE40, but a high-density and price-effective development board is the ULX3S.

Here is a cheap board but with no peripherals: https://www.tindie.com/products/tinyvision_ai/upduino-v30-lo...
Haven't gotten very far yet but TinyFpga BX was easy to get set up and running "LED blink" which is the hardware version of hello world. I've used microcontrollers since forever and want to expand my options.
I have one of these and love it, but unfortunately the tinyfpga team is MIA and getting the boards has been hard to impossible for a long time now.
Aha, that explains why the two spares that I ordered have been on back order.