I was actually lucky to have gotten a FOMU from mithro years ago at a hacker event. It was really fun to play around with micropython on the RISC-V softcore [0]! Thanks to RE the entire toolchain (formerly yosys) is open source for the lattice ICE40 [1] and they continue to add more fpga bitstreams like the ECP5.

If anyone is looking for a cheap (~$15) and larger fpga board to tinker with, look no further than the ColorLight 5A-75b [2]

[0] https://github.com/im-tomu/fomu-workshop/blob/master/docs/ri...

[1] https://f4pga.org/

[2] https://hackaday.com/2020/01/24/new-part-day-led-driver-is-f...

Reminds me of the old Electric Imp, which was like an ESP32 before the ESP32. Also came in a (full size) SD card form factor.

The only use case that comes to my mind is extracting live data from device strictly recording onto SDcard, but wifi enabled SDcards designed for that purpose are already on the market since 2010 (eyefi).

Though it is cool to see a minute FPGA dev board, I don't see the value proposition here. At $45, it is too expensive to use in a product. What is the killer app for this board?

One can get a significantly more powerful Tang Nano 20K [1] kit on Amazon right now for $31 [2].

[1] wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/tang/tang-nano-20k/nano-20k.html

[2] https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-Sipeed-Development-RISC-V-E...

This sounds fun to play with and get feet wet in HDL, but it's only a lattice ice40, I have no idea what you'd seriously do with this. Usually ice40 are used as glue logic, or multiplexing/buffering a bunch of ADC/DAC chips so the processor can do large data transfers instead of a bunch of tiny ones.

The website claims hardware acceleration and... I doubt they got timing closure on the soft CPU at anything greater than 100MHz and you still have to get data to/from it at likely 30~40 MB/s via an SDMMC bus.