Ep002: Curious Gadgets and the FPGA Brain Trust
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the Circuit Sculpture Contest winners, including Kelly Heaton’s resistor bird and Matt Sang’s Z80 wire computer, alongside hacks like a microcontroller-corrected barn door telescope mount. The episode features an interview with the OpenFPGA team—David, Clifford Wolf, Piotr Temski, and Temezzo—at 35C3, discussing the open-source FPGA ecosystem, tools like nextpnr and icestorm, and hardware such as the iCE40, ECP5, and icebreaker. They highlight the shift toward accessible FPGA development, mentioning projects like Tomu, Fumu, and the push for supporting Xilinx 7-series via Project X-Ray.