Even with the fastest speed grade Artix, 1080p output is technically out of spec, but it seems to work OK.
As you might guess I had/have my own ambitions of making a video card. The software side has been a source of dread for me, but with OP's tutorials I may have enough guidance to get back to it.
They do mention the origin story of Macross a few paragraphs up so it seems like an odd criticism. On the other hand, it's kind of neat to see that alien technology is an outlier according to their analysis.
As the OP says, FPGAs are kind of niche and devoted to specialized applications. For example there's Corundum[0] for in-network compute, kind of exotic and maybe too pricey for a hobbyist. The biggest open-source thing out there is of course MiSTer, but it is tied to a particular old dev board and toolchain last I checked.
>what do you _do_ with the cores?
I mean, this is kind of the problem, but in a way it's a funny problem. The strength and the curse of FPGAs is that they can become almost anything you want. However getting that sea of logic into the desired form requires knowledge of the FPGA family, the tools, the hardware, and digital design in general. The "tedious stuff" unfortunately makes up a great deal of FPGA work! Many days I feel like a glorified plumber...
As far as cores go, in FPGA land, the vendor would probably already provide a core (IP, in hardware parlance) for say fooing bars, that is easier to use and probably a far sight more reliable than the project on OpenCores. (Which probably hasn't been touched in a decade, is written in VHDL-87, is using Wishbone when you want AXI, and lacks a test suite.)
As a hobbyist, you might search and find the project on OpenCores, but be scared away by the cruftiness. You then write your own foo_bars module, thereby learning a great deal, but contributing to the fragmentation problem. Plus seeding the internet with weird code with corner-case bugs for LLMs to trip over.
In software world, I can point someone to PostgreSQL (I’ll keep using that example, though my point is there are lots of examples!) to see a fully-realized product including all the tedious stuff. And it’s nothing to do with hobbyists, this exact codebase is the same one that keeps billion-dollar businesses running.
What are the equivalent projects of equal professionalism and completeness in open hardware world? Maybe Open Compute Project?
Or does the jump to “hobbyists” indicate there is very little like that, in other words virtually all serious hardware is not open?
Most serious hardware is not going to be open. I think this is mainly because hardware companies need higher margins, because working with physical things costs money. For most companies that use FPGAs, the custom stuff is the secret sauce, kept under lock and key. Most open source stuff out there is either hobby, or effectively serves as an advertisement for design services.
I'm not that familiar with OCP but certainly driving commodity hardware costs down is a valid object. My interest is more in specialized hardware at the board level. I believe CERN and other high-energy physics labs collaborate on designs, but I've been out of the field for a long time. Much of that sort of hardware doesn't have use in the industry at large; historically speaking, if there is demand, the model has been to spin out a small company to sell equipment to other labs.
The only category of core with what I'd call a big open-source impact is RISC-V processors, as you mentioned above. This is because a small processor is often useful on a non-SoC FPGA. But there were already free-as-in-beer microprocessors available from the FPGA vendors, so RISC-V adoption is really more of a political/philosophical choice.
When people talk about someday having an OSHW scene approaching the vibrancy of the FOSS scene, I'm not so sure there are parallels. People talk about having open tooling, but the existing tooling is already free-as-in-beer (for the device types most people could afford, anyway). The cost of the vendor IPs is already baked into the cost of the device, so you'd still be paying for it. The argument is that open source tools will be easier to use, but I haven't found that to be the case at this point in time.
I think that hardware is just a fundamentally different medium from software, and attracts different kinds of people. It's a comparatively smaller crowd, who tend to be lone wolves. Maybe someday there'll be a critical mass.
I've accepted that I'm going to ignore a certain interest for months, maybe years, and then come back to it when my energy for that subject comes back. Of course this means that I have a lot of books and stuff...
In recent years I've gotten better about hitting the library first instead of buying books. It imposes a natural deadline on things: if you couldn't be bothered to start reading in 3 weeks, then maybe it was just a passing fancy.
Getting older helps too. I feel like I have less energy, which needs to be spent more carefully. But there's also perspective that comes with maturity, and the willingness to forgive myself for not being maximally "productive".
The first thing to note is that while HDL coding may look like programming, it is not (mostly). HDLs are for describing hardware, and it takes some time for this to sink in. There are two sides to the coin: understanding digital design in the abstract, and understanding HDL design patterns to define the desired logic circuits.
If you don't have any digital design experience, an oft-recommended course is nand2tetris.
I should say though, that that is the bottom-up approach. It is possible these days to string together a bunch of IPs and not write any HDL, depending on what you want to do. But you will probably be stuck if anything at all goes awry, so I don't recommend the top-down approach.
Hi, I have degrees in EE and Physics. It's good that you want to get a well-rounded education, but I think focusing on E&M and circuit design will probably pay the most dividends.
Purcell is a physics book, but I think with your math background it might be fine? From there I'd suggest Griffiths E&M, as far as setting up more complicated problems goes. I don't really like the EE-oriented E&M books, but if you need some of the "calculate this value" style of problem maybe you'd want to take a look at them.
Circuit design is kind of unsatisfying these days since on the professional side there's a lot of throwing stuff in the simulator, especially with IC design. I'm an advocate for more hands-on stuff. For the absolute basics I feel there's no substitute for getting some LEDs, resistors, breadboard, and multimeter, and doing some kid level projects. Then there's audio projects, and RF projects, since once you've learned the textbook fundamentals of amplifiers, there's no substitute for building some. Pozar and the ARRL RF project book will take you a long way, though you'll have to buy some test equipment...
But honestly, do you really want to get distracted from your main focus? You may have lost interest by the time you're done with the curriculum. There's a lot you can get done by forging ahead and just learning what you need to as you go along. Why learn amplifier design when the industry is all too happy to sell you a black box gain block? Why learn digital design when microcontrollers are getting faster and cheaper all the time? ;)
https://github.com/mng2/AcornHDMI
Even with the fastest speed grade Artix, 1080p output is technically out of spec, but it seems to work OK.
As you might guess I had/have my own ambitions of making a video card. The software side has been a source of dread for me, but with OP's tutorials I may have enough guidance to get back to it.