And that's fine. Toys are useful for learning. But just don't kid yourself as to what it can or can not do.
You seem pretty hung up on the "toy" characterization, and that's hardly fair. Smaller and simpler devices can be extremely useful and much more than toys. As we have been saying, it depends on what you need (or want) to do.
When I hear that kind of characterisation, that something is a toy because it only offers relatively modest capabilities versus something high end, I can't help but think the person making the characterisation either doesn't know how to design things to be efficient and needs all that real estate just to get something simple done (e.g. we all know people who take megabytes and lots of MIPs to do something that many of us can do with a few bytes and a few hundred CPU cycles AKA "python programmers"
) Or they are compensating for other feelings of inadequacy - cf "big car syndrome". Or it's like the boss who needs the biggest and fastest computer in the office just to read emails and surf the web, pure self aggrandisement. I'm
not saying that
is the case here, just that it's what that kind of posturing always makes me think.
As far as FPGAs that have modestly sized and modestly priced breakout boards available (on the same scale as bluepill and blackpill boards for STM32 microprocessors) there are quite a range of boards for the Lattice iCE40 series of FPGAs. I won't recommend specifics, as the one I have personal experience of, the original upduino, is no longer available (it was all of $7 for a complete board with a 5k LUT FPGA!!!). There have been other boards produced under the 'upduino' name that are currently available. Typically they have 4k or 5k LUTs wihich is a useful middle ground, not so large as to be expensive or encourage wasteful inefficient implementation (
), not so small that you'll be fighting to find enough LUTs to do more than implement relatively trivial logic.
An upside for those who care is that the iCE40 range has a completely open source toolchain available for it. I have no philosophical axe to grind on that front, but the availability of a toolchain that is all command line orientated rather than GUI oriented better suits my way of working, and may better suit other folks of a similar bent.