ErikZachrisson

To be frank after having experience with both FPGA and software development. If you can solve the problem in software, just do it.

The cost in time and complexity of solving a problem in hardware is almost always larger.

When writing software you gain a level of abstraction. You do not have to deal with getting a special hardware (the FPGA), mess with proprietary buggy tools, and all the nitty gritty stuff of proper reset, multiple clock domains, timing closure where each rebuild of your code might take multiple hours to close. And don't get me started with writing HDL-code.

I implemented an object tracker using a FPGA and a webcam and there were multiple hardware problems that needed to be handled such as buffering data in the sdram (design a sdram memory controller), research and implement image filters and debug why the camera image sometimes got corrupted (the connection cables were too long).

Almost all of these problems would have been gone by instead connecting an USB-webcam to my PC and utilize the openCV library.