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very impressive project, its a good time to get into fpga projects

It's much better than before, but it's still surprisingly difficult to buy a cheap (good) FPGA board. For example, the cheapest ECP5 on digikey (FPGA's go for a lot less than list if you're buying more than a few) is about $10 yet the cheapest proper development board is a lot more.

The FPGA manufacturers like the margins, fine, but I'm surprised people who make boards like this one but for other things don't just chuck an FPGA on them (for some definition of "just")

Yeah, ~$45 dollars min for ice40LP on digikey: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-...

But I have no idea how proper it is, only ~10x the cost of the FGPA itself. I'm still interested in it though, kind of want to buy it now but to lazy to figure out how to buy it from where I am now in indonesia and imports are a PITA here :/

Qmtech on Aliexpress have the best price/performance when it comes to FPGA boards.

Prob not bad for some applications, but if you are trying to have cost of a overall system low in order to make it more available to more people… id rather go with the ice40LP's

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