There's that old saw that goes, "If the young hobbyist learns Brand [$BRAND]'s devices and software, when s/he gets on the job s/he can push the organization towards that brand's parts." And that's bullshit. Any company that already does FPGAs already has a preferred vendor which won't change unless there's a Damn Good Reason to do so.
There's that old saw that goes, "If the young hobbyist learns Brand [$BRAND]'s devices and software, when s/he gets on the job s/he can push the organization towards that brand's parts." And that's bullshit. Any company that already does FPGAs already has a preferred vendor which won't change unless there's a Damn Good Reason to do so.And all of those companies are of course many decades old and FPGA choice was made by godly existence and not real people... Did you hear about such thing as startup? Many of those made well established players bite the dust.
And how many startups actually use FPGAs and manage to survive long enough for the product to see the market?
A bit of the problem is also that FPGAs tend to be useful only in pretty advanced projects.
Typical maker projects are just gluing together existing modules and copy pasting some arduino code together. The usual arduino user wouldn't even bother to learn the C language properly, just enough to copy paste and randomly figure out how to get something together. At the same time microcontrolers and SBCs like the raspberry keep getting more powerful, letting them do some pretty impressive stuff.
A lot of high end networking equipment also has FPGAs in there because its the only way to get so much data around.
Do people not actually *read* books now? I chose this example for the simple reason I am reading it at the moment.
Read the text at the bottom of the page. That's *all* you have to do to keep everyone happy. I could easily choose any other device specific book in my library. It would have a similar section on trademarks somewhere. Publishing houses know they need this. YouTubers don't, so they get scary letters from lawyers.
I am not a lawyer. I planned becoming one when I started university, but by the time I got ready for law school it was clear that the legal profession was not what it was in my grandfather's day. So I became a scientist instead.
If @IntelFPGA or @latticesemi are smart they will put out an official response condemning this unprecedented attack on creators
Do people not actually *read* books now? I chose this example for the simple reason I am reading it at the moment.
Read the text at the bottom of the page. That's *all* you have to do to keep everyone happy. I could easily choose any other device specific book in my library. It would have a similar section on trademarks somewhere. Publishing houses know they need this. YouTubers don't, so they get scary letters from lawyers.
I am not a lawyer. I planned becoming one when I started university, but by the time I got ready for law school it was clear that the legal profession was not what it was in my grandfather's day. So I became a scientist instead.
Maybe people just read better sources than you - companies are not *forced* to send C&Ds about any use of their trademark to keep their trademark. That's just trivially wrong.
If another tissue company tries to sell boxes of tissues named Kleenexes, than yes, Kleenex needs to do something about it. They do not, however, need to send C&D notices to the random guy in a store who tells someone to go pick up a box of Kleenexes. They are not required to send C&Ds to anyone who talks about Kleenexes. They are not required to send C&Ds to anyone who writes a how-to guide on using Kleenexes. They are not required to send C&Ds to anyone who reviews Kleenexes. They are not required to send C&Ds to me for writing this post, because I am not attempting to misrepresent my association with the Kleenex brand.
Youtube is filled with educational videos on trademarked products, and somehow all these other companies manage not to lose their trademarks without sending C&Ds everywhere.
Well a CNC controller does have some use for FPGAs. It can be used to interpolate between the movement nodes very accurately in real time and generate very timing precise step signals. There are a few that use it, but most others are directly run from a microcontroller because the accuracies of the hobby printers, router, engravers are just not high enough for the sloppy MCU control to make much of a difference. And if you know what you are doing in terms of programing you can get rather tight timings out of MCUs
In terms of what is actually using FPGAs. Well all of these high speed camera startups such as Chronos and similar have to use a FPGA to move data around. Sometimes game console mod chips for older consoles might include a FPGA to fiddle with some communication bus in real time. There are also some retro gaming video upscalers that turn console video into HDMI, one in particular even did deconvolution in real time to fix blurrynes in N64 graphics. Ben heck also had a good use for a FPGA where it was used to turn the LCD signals in a GameBoy into VGA video so that it could be shown on a big screen.
A open standard for the FPGA industry would alleviate this quite a bit
I think when business people decide to make something, and they hear 'we need to get a FPGA guy for this' they think 'lets make something else'.
I don't even WANT to learn it because what I am going to get stuck in some kind of closed ecosystem.
Does anyone else think that FPGA is like one of the biggest dogs to work with in the electronics world?
Massively complicated, closed software (and jesus I thought C compilers were bad), hard to use, expensive, difficult to solder, windows can probably destroy your design, etc.
I think I would rather work with any other component then a FPGA if I could avoid it.
Well a CNC controller does have some use for FPGAs. It can be used to interpolate between the movement nodes very accurately in real time and generate very timing precise step signals. There are a few that use it, but most others are directly run from a microcontroller because the accuracies of the hobby printers, router, engravers are just not high enough for the sloppy MCU control to make much of a difference. And if you know what you are doing in terms of programing you can get rather tight timings out of MCUs
Given that the motor control is almost always done by dedicated chips (Allegro or Trinamic drivers are popular) the only thing that the MCU has to be doing is interpret the G-code and calculate the steps. FPGA won't help you any there, the MCU is perfectly fine to send the necessary pulses and the stepper motors don't really care that much if there is a bit of a jitter in the signal here and there.
And even if you are using closed loop control, with encoders and what not, then you are doing it using the hardware timers - both to read the encoders and to generate the motor signals. Typically you would have a controller per motor/encoder pair talking to the main controller board.
I don't see what difference it would make to implement a timer on an FPGA or use a hardware timer in an MCU (assuming it is a decent timer designed for encoders and/or motor control so you don't need to rely e.g. on interrupts to reload it). I don't see where you would get any "sloppy timing" there. Even the expensive industrial machines don't use FPGAs for this - there is no need for it there.
Massively complicated, closed software (and jesus I thought C compilers were bad), hard to use, expensive, difficult to solder, windows can probably destroy your design, etc.
I think I would rather work with any other component then a FPGA if I could avoid it. I think they need all the help they can get to get rid of all the engineering questions associated with them. If they had advanced open source software I might try it. Having to do all the complications in a closed ecosystem?? NO THANKS
Does anyone else think that FPGA is like one of the biggest dogs to work with in the electronics world?