Every now and then, among the struggles and the giggles, axoman manages to shock the community by looking a heck of a lot more intelligent on the forum than he could ever manage in the flesh. Today is such a momentous occasion, for today, axoman talks about FPGAs, something which axoman believes the ideal Axoloti should be based around.
As a user, ask yourself, how many times have you wanted to do something but are quickly brought down to earth when you realise that your expectations greatly exceed the physical capabilities of the hardware? And how many times, I wonder, has @johannes sat there scratching his head thinking, hey ARM, that was a really dumbass way to design a processor, cause it would have been so much better if you had dedicated this to more outputs and that to something else.
Well, the answer to all these problems appears to be FPGA technology. FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array, which for those of you not as intelligent as axoman, basically means it's a completely programmable chip architecture. It's an IC that becomes whatever you program it to become, be it a processor, amplifier, anything, absolutely anything you want it to be. It's kinda like being AMD, ARM, ATMEL or INTEL, you get to completely design what the IC does!
So it arrives completely dumb, it doesn't do anything until programmed to be something, and that means you get to decide which pins are input pins, which pins are output pins, and everything that sits between those pins. And because FPGAs are effectively realtime, they don't have the burden of working like a standard processor that processes intructions one at a time in a serial fashion. FPGAs can do processing in parallel, in realtime, at truly insane frequencies if you design them that way.
So what I'm getting at here is that rather than settle for off-the-shelf components and designing Axoloti around a STM32F427, you could program your entire system into a custom microprocessor chip, where the very architecture of the chip is designed by yourself to do exactly what you want it to do. I think that's amazing, really amazing, and apparently the only thing you need to learn in order to design and use an FPGA, is to learn the Varilog/HDL language, which is basically special language used for programming your custom structure into the FPGA.
I honestly recommend everyone watch this video, even those of you with no interest in the actual electronics side of things, because I think his enthusiasm alone will make you realise why devices such as these are the future even though they're already with us, and have been for some time: