I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
Another option, do you want to see by yourself how caching improves code performance? You can make that on an FPGA also.
I have done some time ago a very nice course which is called From Nand to Tetris, that teaches how to go all the way from gates to a processor. My plan for the near future is to implement the NAND2Tetris processor on a Basys 3 board, and make some of the examples I mentioned (like, probing internal registers using HW tools, or seeing by yourself how a cache improves performance). I hope to make some of these things available on my site. I am the OP, but just in case, my website is https://fpgaer.tech
The "problem" is really that you can do a LOT with MCUs, and programming FPGAs is very different than microcontrollers serially executing your code so they are pretty niche.
Like, if you for example needed to drive few thousand neopixels techncially FPGA would be perfect use case, just make a blob of memory and a bunch of serializers that feed each chain of LEDs.
... or you can just use some DMA magick on some fast STM32 and hack it out without having to learn new programming language.
My only relatively reasonable suggestion is making perfect hardware emulators for old hardware, like vintage computers and their parts.
Alas, FPGA programming model is neither easy nor intuitive, and the tools are mostly proprietary, expensive, and (as I heard) have a steep learning curve.
Yes, there is, if you're willing to learn.
>Always game to learn a new tech.
Great. A good starting point is NANDLand[0].
Their board is not at all a bad purchase at <$100, particularly to follow their tutorials, but you can do better[1] if you are adventurous. e.g. iCEBreaker or iCESugar.
I'd still recommend to stick to iCE40 and the open source yosys/nextpnr stack, until you become competent enough to actually know what you want/need.
Many years ago, that would have been the only solution to avoid paying thousands of dollars for a professional instrument.
However, nowadays there exist a number of commercial solutions for such cheap instruments, which are made exactly like this, i.e. with an FPGA surrounded by appropriate I/O circuits and connectors, some USB or Ethernet interface for the PC and some capture software.
These have the advantage that are ready to use out of the box, but making yourself such an instrument can be instructive.
With a bit of luck, someone will reply with better options.
Edit: or look at this list: https://hackaday.io/search?term=fpga
Though most of what you can do with the FPGA would be covered by built-in timer/capture modules or the PICO PIO modules on other chips (though IIRC, some of the boards have analog support in the FPGA if you wanted to do real-time audio processing). I have not found a particular hobbyist use for them, only know it from my father teaching some computer engineering courses and picking since he could use the same board for digital logic and microcontroller programming.