I agree. My first project was a dual port SRAM emulator on iCE40 with UART bus snoop to enable real time tuning of really old BMW Motronic ECUs. This was a pret

I agree. My first project was a dual port SRAM emulator on iCE40 with UART bus snoop to enable real time tuning of really old BMW Motronic ECUs. This was a pretty fun/easy first project and had about the right scope. I started in icecube and eventually moved over to the OSS toolchain which was nice as well. If I had started by trying to accelerate some kind of complex algorithm attached to a microcontroller I doubt I'd have finished.