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If you're going to do serious audio signals processing, you're probably going to very quickly find out that an 8bit Arduino and the Arduino environment are nowh

If you're going to do serious audio signals processing, you're probably going to very quickly find out that an 8bit Arduino and the Arduino environment are nowhere near powerful enough for your needs. If you really stick with it, you'll upgrade to something significantly more powerful (both hardware and tooling wise). If you start to push the limits of a 32bit microcontroller or DSP, but are still sensitive to price/power consumption/footprint/etc, then you will truly understand what the need for an FPGA is. That's my point; you as an embedded beginner (which is what most of the "maker" market is) are multiple revelations away from even beginning to understand why you would want to use an FPGA, let alone know how to work with one.

claudiawerner 7y ago
I've done three years of an electronic engineering degree with a digital design on FPGAs course and I'm still not entirely sure why one would want to use an FPGA for anything - am I right in guessing that what you write in HDL for an FPGA will be faster than what you write in C? Or do you use the FPGA for testing then export designs into hardware?
- seabird 7y ago
  >faster than what you write in C It's hard to compare working with an HDL to working with a programming language like C; they are fundamentally different. The short answer to that question is that using an FPGA can lead to massive but situational performance increases. You can't use an FPGA for everything, but when you need it, you need it. >testing then export designs into hardware This is another common use case. Some designs can be tested on an FPGA before committing that design for production as an ASIC. There's also the case where you may need to reconfigure the hardware, so you can never truly commit to an ASIC, and continue using the FPGA.
skybrian 7y ago
Oh sure, I don't know why anyone would start with an 8-bit Arduino considering that much faster 32-bit CPU's seem to be about the same price? Whatever you go with, as a beginner you're going to want a lot of help from pre-written software. The Arduino IDE and Wiring/Arduino standard API is a good example. The mistake I made with my first purchase was not making sure that a good audio library was available for the hardware I picked. (I might consider writing one for fun, but not in C++ since I don't have much experience in that language.) But it looks like Teensy has a nice audio library, and there are other projects that look intriguing like Bela and Axoloti. I expect (speculating) that a similar rule would apply for an FPGA; it would only be appealing to most beginners if someone more experienced came up with an interesting design that makes use of an FPGA and documented it pretty well, so you're not starting from scratch.

claudiawerner 7y ago

I've done three years of an electronic engineering degree with a digital design on FPGAs course and I'm still not entirely sure why one would want to use an FPGA for anything - am I right in guessing that what you write in HDL for an FPGA will be faster than what you write in C? Or do you use the FPGA for testing then export designs into hardware?

seabird 7y ago
>faster than what you write in C It's hard to compare working with an HDL to working with a programming language like C; they are fundamentally different. The short answer to that question is that using an FPGA can lead to massive but situational performance increases. You can't use an FPGA for everything, but when you need it, you need it. >testing then export designs into hardware This is another common use case. Some designs can be tested on an FPGA before committing that design for production as an ASIC. There's also the case where you may need to reconfigure the hardware, so you can never truly commit to an ASIC, and continue using the FPGA.

skybrian 7y ago

Oh sure, I don't know why anyone would start with an 8-bit Arduino considering that much faster 32-bit CPU's seem to be about the same price? Whatever you go with, as a beginner you're going to want a lot of help from pre-written software. The Arduino IDE and Wiring/Arduino standard API is a good example. The mistake I made with my first purchase was not making sure that a good audio library was available for the hardware I picked. (I might consider writing one for fun, but not in C++ since I don't have much experience in that language.) But it looks like Teensy has a nice audio library, and there are other projects that look intriguing like Bela and Axoloti. I expect (speculating) that a similar rule would apply for an FPGA; it would only be appealing to most beginners if someone more experienced came up with an interesting design that makes use of an FPGA and documented it pretty well, so you're not starting from scratch.