Another low cost fpga board I've found is the EBAZ4205, which has a Zynq7010 SoC (fpga and dual core arm CPU). I got one a few years ago for 40 AUD. They were originally Bitcoin miner control boards. https://theokelo.co.ke/getting-starting-with-ebaz4205-zynq-7...

Mostly unrelated, but I (mostly Copilot) spent some time re-authoring a software stack of HUB75 displays in our office with rotating pixel art. A previous team set them up on a overly-complex stack that relied on a bunch of services that haven't existed for years, getting them stuck in place for the last few years.

While I found the hardware pretty simple, HUB75 displays seem _very_ picky about over-volting. The setup is basically a simple controller (such as ESP32-Trinity) plugged directly into one HUB75 (potentially chained to a few more).

When running off of USB power it pulls the voltage down to ~4.7v and the image looks great. When running off our junky Amazon 5v barrel connectors the image gets all sorts of artifacting. Quite frustrating!

Anyhow, I can't recommend HUB75 displays enough. Toss some retro pixel art on there and it is such a nice little picture frame sized treat!

I use this one a lot: https://store.mesanet.com/index.php?route=product/product&pr...

Last month I reverse-engineered a 25 years old embedded system that controls a ground-penetrating radar, which isn't commercially available anymore. It uses ECP parallel port to talk to the radar's Rx/Tx fibre optic control unit, so I used the Mesa board to implement that part of it, hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi and put the touchscreen HMI on that.