Buy a cheap FPGA board and get started. I can't stress the importance of this step too much. Use this if you are writing code in Verilog: https://en.wikipedi

Buy a cheap FPGA board and get started. I can't stress the importance of this step too much. Use this if you are writing code in Verilog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilator It really helps once your projects aren't small anymore. It is nowhere near as important as the first step. Whatever else you do is 1) secondary and 2) will be obvious after step 1.