FPGA hacking

I've been looking into FPGAs lately and I'm fascinated with the field in general, but it is a very niche technology. On top of being niche, most of it is covered by NDA... Are you familiar with any sort of FPGA hacking that is not a simulation of old videogame consoles or ARM processors? Could it be better than using a microcontroller or microprocessor?

I mean, FPGAs are only cost-effective low energy and not really that much solution to what graphics cards can already do. The only real uptake is that they already do their computations on pre-defined logic so their speed is much greater. They have been used in hacking as far as I know only in some low cost solutions to password or encryption cracking, but only as far as DES, anything more it's easier to just pay AWS server with NVIDIA Tesla for an hour. Seeing how you just combined an empty question by combining words "FPGA" and "hacking" you should probably inform yourself more about either one of those before asking any more questions. >Could it be better than using a microcontroller or microprocessor? Better in what way? It's faster in it's computing speed, but it isn't multipurposed like microcontrollers and microprocessors. It is designed for certain purposes where few operations are already pre-defined. Basic fundemental difference is that FPGAs use arrays of logic gates to get to their logical and mathematical operations whilst microcontrollers/processors use Arithmetic Logic Unit to make those operations in cycles with registers to store the values.

>>7626 I don't think he meant "hacking" in that way. I've spent 2 semesters in school doing labs with FPGA's but we only did MIPS implementations. Most people were awful at it. But some guy was able to do some interesting stuff using the vga output, making games etc. I always wanted to learn more about them too since I have one laying around but didn't have the time.

>>7627 >VGA output ,making games FPGAs are really good at fast to do higher logic operations. I think I even saw CPLD being used in power supply of Tesla Model S when they dissasembled it. Basically think of any high speed digital logic implementation that isn't THAT hard and you will see the benefits. Hell, even before the ASIC miners of crypto back in the day (before GPUs) FPGAs were used. Overall, FPGAs fell out of fashion because sometimes it's just easier to spend half a dollar more per chip on microprocessor.

>>7627 Op here. >I don't think he meant "hacking" in that way I meant it in a broader sense. Sorry that my message wasn't coherent, I was pretty sleep deprived when I made the thread. There are some real time vga -> colored ascii vga converter on YouTube. Look up "ascii fpga" it should come up. That is one of the things i meant. Another thing: I am interested if FPGAs could be used for say, monitors, where it would cache everything that resembles SSN or credit card number. All seemlessly done through the fpga embedded into the monitor. Where could we leverage the FPGA computing speed maliciously?

Op here again. I would call this hacking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8txvmXUIJQ One of the things this guy did is reverse engineer the board programmer so he wouldn't have to spend money on a proprietary device. Very fascinating video. Here is the real-time ascii video thing I mentioned earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PCL33Pk270 doesn't quite fall in the "hacking" category now when I think about it again. The reason I'm asking here is that most of other communities I find are obsessed with FPGAs strictly in mining sense. Please feel free to point me somewhere else.

>>7632 >Hell, even before the ASIC miners of crypto back in the day (before GPUs) FPGAs were used. >Overall, FPGAs fell out of fashion because sometimes it's just easier to spend half a dollar more per chip on microprocessor. I wouldn't say they're out of fashion, FPGAs are still very relevant. FPGAs are mostly used for prototyping, when your design is not ready to be burned into silicon yet, or for products that need to be flexible. They're also used when quantities are too low to manufacture ASICs.

Moved to >>>/Δ/2899.