any advice for a beginner getting into fpga dev? i'm thinking of using one for a hobby project, but don't really know much other than "very fast programmable hardware for when microcontrollers are too slow and/or an inelegant hack". (my background is largely in software, but the last few years i've been doing various hobby electronics projects, so I have a bunch of general electronics knowledge but basically nothing in the programmable logic domain)
So, a good place to start is to get a cheap dev board, I recommend something like the iCEBreaker and a few PMOD connectors like this and this so you have some input and output.
I suggest the iCE40's because they have a fully FOSS toolchain so you don't need any vendor tools to get started.
With this you can get started following some examples and going thru the iCEBreaker workshop
This should help you get your feet on the ground, but the most important thing to remember with hardware is that it's not like software where instructions happen one after another, in hardware everything happens in parallel unless made to not, but it's not that scary once you get into it.
I hope that helps! if you have any other questions let me know!