The big barriers of FPGA for Hobbyists are:
- cost of device: which has gone down but still higher than the cost of an embedded CPU.
- cost of tools associated with the FPGA and hardware:
+++ First, is the programming JTAG, the device from Xilinx and Altera is ridiculously expensive. Digilent and Terasic have made cheaper version but still in the range of one kit.
+++ Then the cost of the tools, FPGA prove to be useful in the range of above 50MHz. For this, you need to invest in some good scope as stmdude has mentioned.
- Learning curve of HDL design. For hardware you've got to know and do it right quite a lot of things to see some magic happens.
I've been thinking and doing some sort of project here.
https://github.com/jefflieu/reconAlthough, it has different approach from the papilo, but still same goal: to make the path of moving to FPGA platform from PIC/Atmega easier.
The idea is to have a collection of pre-verified embedded systems (Most importantly, flash, SDRAM Memory interface timing) from simple to complex where people can start doing something fun on FPGA straight away. Then modify part of the system as they wish along the way. So the big chunk of the work of getting something up and running is done.
So far, not many people get excited about this project other than me
You're welcome to join, buy a board, create a system, verify it and upload it, all open source.