Armchair Engineering - Ignorance is bliss
I'm totally into my FPGA. Embedded Micro is supposed to be announcing a new FPGA based on the new Artix 7 FPGA chip that will allow me to run the new Vivado design suite from Xilinx. I'm currently using the very outdated ISE tool (it's like using Microsoft Front Page to do modern web development). ISE works (with modifications to the binaries to make it work on Windows 10), but I'd like to try out some new (to me) stuff like System Verilog (which is unsupported in ISE).
I love the idea of an FPGA and I'm about to dip my feet into writing my own CPU based on the Basic CPU example project on Embedded Micro's website. I'd like to expand the instruction set to larger than 4-bits. It's probably going to be completely bizarre to anyone who actually really knows what they're doing (real-life engineers), but I don't care, I'm doing it for fun.
I thought about having a register that would write its data directly to a MIDI interface so I could have instructions that would send MIDI signals. I'd also like to figure out the best way to interface with the CPU so I can load programs into it without uploading a new bin file each time. The example requires me to use a custom-built Assembler to make the Lucid code required for running my programs on the CPU. It would be cool to have a loader on the PC that could upload the program to the Mojo using the USB connection and the on-board microprocessor.
Update: November 21, 2017 - It seems that what I'm looking for is already out there. I was already aware of the OpenCores website, but I also found the PicoBlaze and MicroBlaze microcontroller cores from Xilinx for the FPGA. I'm going to start working with the PicoBlaze and see what I can do to extend it to interact with external peripherals. That's going to save me a lot of time trying to figure out how to extend the CPU sample from Embedded Micro.
I also thought about adding a 12-bit VGA connector and seeing if I could learn how to interface with it using a custom CPU. The main issue I'm running into is I am quickly hitting my wall of interest. The best way to describe it is that if the concepts are too deep (i.e. - they require an advanced degree of some sort to make sense of them), then I tend to veer away from the topic altogether and move on to something a bit more amateur. However, I keep getting drawn back to CPU design, even though it's a very complicated topic.
I've been watching Ben Eater's awesome series about his breadboard computer on YouTube and learning a lot about how computers work at the most basic level (logic gates, timer-driven clocks, and data buses).
Another topic I've been exploring is how to build a "pocket computer" or similar homebrew computer based on the Zilog Z-80 processor from the 80's (70's?). I have a big interest in this particular processor because it's relatively simple as far as CPU's go.
I'd like to take all of this knowledge and apply it to my custom CPU project. I think it would be cool to come up with an amalgamation of Ben Eater's breadboard computer and the Mojo CPU such that I can control and interact with the FPGA CPU using buttons, switches, 7-segment displays, and possibly even LCD displays.
It has taken me over a year to get comfortable enough with electronics to feel somewhat confident in my abilities to pull some of this off. It's a slow road because it is only a hobby, after all, and my day job takes priority. If there's a topic that I need to study at home to help me on the job, I tend to learn those things first, then spend my extra time learning the electronics and FPGA knowledge.
When I first got into this, it was so that I could play with making my own music "synthesizers" using CMOS logic chips, but that rapidly advanced to the idea of "chips on a chip" that the FPGA represents. I can never just do anything the easy way. I like to take my problems and abstract them away until they are almost unrecognizable, then find the solution that covers the most ground. It serves me well at work when solving large-scale enterprise computing problems, but it makes hobbies a bit more complicated than they should be.
Ultimately, I see myself doing a lot more playing around with the FPGA in the future and less time with actual silicon chips and discreet components. I might make plug-in boards for my FPGA to accomplish some task like making a VGA interface, but even that may not be necessary when Embedded Micro releases their HDMI shield for the Mojo.
When it comes down to it, I think that the fact that I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to FPGA coding is a good thing. It's that kind of spirit that allowed the microprocessor and home computer movement to sprout from the garages and basements of amateurs back when room-sized computers ruled the computing world and IBM thought the home computer was a toy and (luckily) ignored it. I'm not going to cause any real damage and I might actually stumble upon something fun along the way. Sure, I'm doing this the hard way, but I think it's too late for me to go to a university and get a degree in electrical or electronics engineering. Besides, I think this is a lot more fun...