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Well, there's an Arduino FPGA board : the MKR Vidor 4000[0] However I'm not sure how much people use it and if it really has the simplicity that Arduino brough

Well, there's an Arduino FPGA board : the MKR Vidor 4000[0] However I'm not sure how much people use it and if it really has the simplicity that Arduino brought to tinkering with microcontrollers. I read and hear a lot that the FPGA dev tooling is usually not really great to use and very vendor-specific, but it's something I haven't tinkered with yet so I don't really know much ! [0]: https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-mkr-vidor-4000 https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-mkr-vidor-4000

duskwuff 4y ago
> Well, there's an Arduino FPGA board : the MKR Vidor 4000 It's an Arduino with an FPGA on it, yes. But the FPGA is practically a hood ornament: there is no support whatsoever for building gateware in the Arduino IDE, only for using a set of prebuilt demonstration bitstreams, and what little documentation Arduino has provided on using the FPGA (e.g. https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/mkr-vidor-4000/vidor-quartus-vhdl https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/mkr-vidor-4000/vidor-quart...) is extremely vague and is missing a lot of critical information. (Additionally, some of the product specifications for the board are highly misleading -- for example, some pages refer to the edge connector as "mini PCI Express" and suggest that it can be used "to creat [sic] your own PCI interfaces", but the FPGA on the board does not support PCIe.) You're much better off with a dedicated FPGA development board. Arduino hasn't brought anything useful to the table here.
- trotFunky 4y ago
  Thanks for bringing more details into light ! As I've said I don't know much about the space and sadly suspected that it wouldn't be great, but not to this degree. It's a bit sad and it's not the "easy solution" that would have made it an easy choice for me if I were to tinker with FPGAs. Not that you have an answer, but it makes me wonder what is the target audience for this board ?
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > Not that you have an answer, but it makes me wonder what is the target audience for this board ? I have a feeling that the primary audience for this product was Arduino's own management team, rather than any actual customer needs.

duskwuff 4y ago

> Well, there's an Arduino FPGA board : the MKR Vidor 4000 It's an Arduino with an FPGA on it, yes. But the FPGA is practically a hood ornament: there is no support whatsoever for building gateware in the Arduino IDE, only for using a set of prebuilt demonstration bitstreams, and what little documentation Arduino has provided on using the FPGA (e.g. https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/mkr-vidor-4000/vidor-quartus-vhdl https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/mkr-vidor-4000/vidor-quart...) is extremely vague and is missing a lot of critical information. (Additionally, some of the product specifications for the board are highly misleading -- for example, some pages refer to the edge connector as "mini PCI Express" and suggest that it can be used "to creat [sic] your own PCI interfaces", but the FPGA on the board does not support PCIe.) You're much better off with a dedicated FPGA development board. Arduino hasn't brought anything useful to the table here.

trotFunky 4y ago
Thanks for bringing more details into light ! As I've said I don't know much about the space and sadly suspected that it wouldn't be great, but not to this degree. It's a bit sad and it's not the "easy solution" that would have made it an easy choice for me if I were to tinker with FPGAs. Not that you have an answer, but it makes me wonder what is the target audience for this board ?
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > Not that you have an answer, but it makes me wonder what is the target audience for this board ? I have a feeling that the primary audience for this product was Arduino's own management team, rather than any actual customer needs.