Me too. For some things you need to be as fast or cheap or low-power or whatever as the competition to win, other times you just want to see how far you can go.

Me too. For some things you need to be as fast or cheap or low-power or whatever as the competition to win, other times you just want to see how far you can go. At my hackerspace we've been mucking about with Clifford Wolf's PicoRV Risc-V implementation on Lattice Ice40 FPGAs lately. This'll give you something that's maybe on par with a lower-end ARM Cortex-M, plus the flexibility of the few thousand spare look-up tables. All open and hackable with open source tools (except for the actual FPGAs, mind). It's not much, but it's a start.