I love all the FPGA boards coming out but I really wish the software was better. Lattice uses the same synthesizer as Xilinx which is well known to be completely user hostile (will silently optimize huge swaths of code because it doesn't like them). The least headaches come from Altera but that's not a high bar...
And I think you'll find this is the exact reason the iCE40s are showing up in so many hobbyist projects.
I'm at my hackerspace right now. There's three people with HX8K evaluation boards at this table alone (I've got two, actually). None of us have even downloaded the Lattice tools.
I've got the HX8K eval board doing text over VGA at 1280x1024 with a simple home-etched PCB that plus into it and some very naive code, hope to hit 1920x1080... It's a lot of fun. The toolchain has some niggles, but overall it's extremely pleasant and I'm so happy it exists. I've been wanting to work with programmable logic for a few years since getting into electronics, but I've just not got along with the Xilinx and Altera tools.
It sounds like this board is going to be available for $30 and you add your own Rasp-Pi - but the $5 Pi-Zero plugs straight in on the end of the board.
There's an ARM M3 acting as FPGA programmer, GPIO, ADC and up to 512K bytes of fast SRAM on the flip-side of the board.
You might consider Clifford Wolf's Project Ice Storm - an open source tool chain for several Lattice devices - consisting of YoSys Synthesiser and Arachne Place and Route.
I think with Intel starting off on FPGAs, we might see some sanity. It's clear that those FPGAs can compute with GPGPU workloads, and depending on their adoption, we might see similar tooling.
The Xilinx synthesizer is certainly interesting. I had some fun porting a design someone else had created for I think Synplify to that a few years back, because it went and replaced a state machine crossing two clock domains with one that wasn't safe for that purpose.
the national instruments myRIO board has probably the lowest barrier to entry for FPGA programming and also microcontroller programming since it uses a zynq processor, both of which are programmed with LabVIEW. it also runs a real-time linux OS. but it isn't available to the general public, being reserved for academic use. i am not for sure why.
"myStorm is the perfect combination of a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, a $1, 32-bit ARM microcontroller and a $5 versatile low power FPGA – an open hardware platform – brought to life with innovative open source software."
In response to Joshu - I don't think this is a Kickstarter Campaign - I get it's two guys in the UK doing this off their own backs - and in record time - design on laptop to working board prototype in less than 2 weeks - with the pcbs made in Shenzhen China, in under a week. There on Twitter under #myStorm - if you want to check them out
It looks like they have 512K bytes of 10nS SRAM on the back of the board - but it's neat how the $5 Rapberry Pi-Zero plugs in at one end - some cool overall pics on Twitter if you search #myStorm
There is no 4K die. The 4K chips are using 8K dies, the lattice software limits the number of usable LUTs to 4K. IceStorm will give you access to all 8K LUTs in the device.
Really? On the http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ IceStorm site - If you look carefully at the table of supported devices - the ICE40HX4K-144 is there - 2 rows from the bottom
Am I right in thinking 8K refers to the number of LUTs/cells? If so I won't be fitting the Rocket RISC-V design in one any time soon. Although it's a good start - I'll be very happy to see the back of Xilinx Vivado awfulness one day.
