Field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, are the popular technology of the moment. They combine the advantages of programmable hardware and custom-designed circuits by letting you alter the connections between logic units to implement an almost limitless range of functions.

While they’re not a new technology, they’ve historically been expensive and hard to program. However, things are starting to change, and the Alchitry project is aiming to make FPGA development much easier for beginners. It comes from the people behind the Mojo IDE, which is far simpler to use than the professional development environments using VHDL or Verilog. It’s hardly beginner-friendly in the sense that we wouldn’t recommend it to someone with no technical experience, but if you can program, you should be able to get to grips with this.