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0 pointsPolylactic_acid6y ago0 comments

Its not lost, Its now microcontroller/arduino programming. Its a lot of fun to write code for something so direct to the hardware. There is no OS, no security, no multi tasking. You just write a bit to a certain memory address linked to a pin and motor go brrr.

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WWLink6y ago· 2 in thread

Sometimes I think the higher end embedded chips are even more fun, because you have an FPGA with shared memory to the processor and tons of IO pins. You can do some truly ridiculous things, including emulating other processors in the fpga fabric hehe.

Polylactic_acidOP6y ago

I haven't tried FPGAs yet, just doing basic AVR programming with GCC-AVR and avrdude. Do FPGAs have an open source/hobby community around them like AVR does? I have heard bad things about FPGA companies being old fashioned/secretive.

opencl6y ago

It's true that the FPGA vendors are very secretive, often to the point of requiring NDAs for access to datasheets and toolchains.

There is open source tooling for some FPGAs and a fairly small but very helpful community around it.

Yosys, IceStorm, SymbiFlow, and nmigen are the major projects in the space that I'm aware of.

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