#4347 Fun Things to Do with FPGAs
#4347 Fun Things to Do with FPGAs #4347 What are 15 fun things to do with FPGAs? Since you’ve got that cluster of 42 Arty A7-100Ts in the works, you’re clearly beyond the "make an LED blink" stage. However, FPGAs are the ultimate "sandboxes of reality," and there’s a lot of fun to be had by pivoting between high-speed DSP, retro-computing, and sheer hardware hacking. Here are 15 projects ranging from "weekend fun" to "deep-dive engineering": 1. Retro-Console Synthesis (MiSTer Style) Instead of software emulation, use HDL to recreate the actual logic of a MOS 6502 or a Motorola 68000. Implementing a NES or Sega Genesis core on your FPGAs allows for cycle-accurate gaming with zero input lag. 2. Real-Time Ray Tracing Accelerator Build a dedicated pipeline for Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) traversals. Even a modest FPGA can often outpace a general-purpose CPU at the specific intersection math required for ray tracing. 3. Software-Defined Radio (SD...