carlosedp

I started playing with FPGAs and HDLs a couple years ago with no hardware design background (I'm mostly a software architect/engineer) and in the end found that a "higher-level" HDL suited me better.

I chose Chisel (https://www.chisel-lang.org/) an HDL based on Scala (technically a Scala DSL) which can provide many facilities to hardware generation.

I'd highly advise looking into it although also knowing Verilog helps a lot.

The Unleashed board has a performance similar to a Raspberry Pi 3 in cpu terms but it's biggest bottleneck is that the SD card is running on a SPI bus where it gets something like 2MB/s. This is due to having the complete SOC as opensource and the SD card association not allowing open source IP for it's interface.

Here is a simple benchmark comparing a Linux VM in my laptop with 2 cores, 4 cores and the RockPro64 board. On the SBC section I've put the power consumption during my tests:

https://gist.github.com/carlosedp/f9e5c72ed4c1b66917ad3348bf...

Fantastic for a $80 board that consumes less than 10W.

According to the post they fetch from Foursquare API.

Actually that's not necessary. I have XBMC installed into an old Macbook that uses the Apple Remote perfectly. Their usage fits into A.R. layout and buttons.