apio

I've had good experiences using Upduino 3.0 and 3.1 [0] with the IceStorm tools via apio [1]. I wrote a blog post [2] with some info on getting things set up via Linux. All you need is the Upduino board, which interfaces to your host system via USB (so no special programmer is needed). [0] https://tinyvision.ai/products/upduino-v3-1 [1] https://github.com/FPGAwars/apio [2] https://daveho.github.io/2021/02/07/upduino3-getting-started...

I think there are a lot of major developments in the last 20 years, although I'm not active in the field. Symbiflow is largely a distribution of yosys, a bunch of other IceStorm projects, and nextpnr (is that part of IceStorm?), in the same sense that Debian is a distribution of Linux. Another one, but I think limited to Lattice FPGAs, is https://github.com/FPGAwars/apio. I think the biggest development, though, is that there's enormously more off-the-shelf Verilog and VHDL, not just on OpenCores like 20 years ago, but also on GitLab, GitHub, and so on. Easy examples are CPUs like James Beckman's J1A, the VexRiscv design used in Bunnie's Precursor: https://github.com/SpinalHDL/VexRiscv (as little as 504 Artix-7 LUTs and 505 flip-flops), and Google's OpenTitan. But from my POV the more interesting reason for using an FPGA is for things

if you're more comfortable with the CLI, you should take a look at the apio project (https://github.com/FPGAwars/apio). It neatly bundles all the required tools. Regarding HDLs, I'm still learning so can't offer any good advice on that.

All these new affordable FPGA are getting really tempting to learn more about them. I've been debating for a while to get the TinyFPGA BX board from Sparkfun. Though I don't have a specific application yet. Are FPGA used in robotics often? Or is the response time so low (relatively) that it makes more sense to stick with a uC? Side note, this might seem like stupid question, but can anyone explain what APIO[1] is (which TinyFPGA uses)? I'm kind of confused what it's used for. [1] https://github.com/FPGAwars/apio