About Project F
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay, Creative Think seminar (1982)
There’s something profoundly satisfying about designing at the hardware level, be it creating your own arcade game, handling unusual hardware interfaces, building your own robot, creating art, analysing oodles of data, or even developing your own CPU. Working with FPGAs gives me a sense of delight so often lacking in modern software development.
An FPGA is like a giant virtual breadboard or Lego for electronics: if you can imagine it, you can probably build it. So why isn’t everyone designing with FPGAs? Some will argue that hardware is fundamentally hard, that hardware development requires a different mindset. There is some truth to this, but I believe the main reason is the lack of exciting resources to learn from: with a few notable exceptions, the Internet is an FPGA desert. Project F aims to be a little oasis where you can quench your thirst for FPGA knowledge, where you can find designs to learn from and enable your own projects. I hope you enjoy your visit.
– Will Green, 2020
Get in touch on Mastodon, Bluesky, or X.
What’s Next?
Get started with FPGA and RISC-V tutorials or check out my FPGA demos.