[mikewarot]

If you really want to stretch your mind, consider learning Verilog. Writing code that takes exactly ZERO* time to execute, and all works in parallel, is strange at first.

I got my first FPGA board from Amazon for $27 (a Tang Nano 9k), and use YoSys to program it (open source for the win!)

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* Actually, all of the code in a block executes at the same time, real world chips have delays, of course.

[bosch_mind]

What can you make with that?

[Jtsummers]

It's a hardware description language. We used VHDL (not Verilog, but equivalent) for some custom processing in a radio, sped things up versus running in software or with a DSP (at the time, DSPs today may be able to replace good chunks of what was in VHDL running on an FPGA in that project).