If you want to do something interesting using electronics skills look to build a "hardware wallet" which can keep private keys secure from a compromised general purpose computer.
OMG
THAT SOUNDS FREAKING INTERESTING.
I still seriously want to dive into FPGA's because it's a great skill to have and it fits within my person skill set (so I assume) I love electronics but didn't like mechanics so i left engineering for computer science after a year and a half.
Plus I loved the post in custom hardware about starting an ASIC design group and well, FPGA is an important part to prototyping and developing ASICs
It would be interesting to use an FPGA to generate a cryptographic key to access and modify funds, create adresses at the push of a button, and of course a blockchain comparison /decryptor. It might need as much horsepower as a miner.
What i tried to avoid is that you mistakenly think to become rich via mining and spend tons of money in mining equip and then you realize that you made the wrong choice. Better safe than sorry!
I apologise, I was feeling extremely self concious about my post as if I had asked something rather stupid. So the bluntness of the first reply out of 60+ views kind of startled me.
I think that a lot of people just get worried about miners attempting to use old designs when they are going to prove a losing proposition for those attempting to make money doing it. I honestly think that he was attempting to look out for your best interests and advise you that if your plan was to make money that was not the way to go about it. I would also like to hear the answer to your question as it is still valuable. Even if the rigs no longer produce the profit they might once have the intellectual puzzle of how to get the most out of them is still interesting. It is like wondering how to make the best wind up clock. Sure we have much better things out, but it is still interesting to think about. Unfortunately I can not really give any useful information on the topic. I hope that someone comes by to answer and I wish you luck in your endeavors to work on it.
Now that I think about it my question is more directed at FPGAMiners architecture for his code. I wanted to know if, in the process of processing hash's the logic block was used or if the commands are mostly boolean comparisons. Since getting multiple logic gates is extremely cheap (500k for 30 bucks) but only cover boolean operations OR, AND, XOR etc etc, while Logic block tables, which are much more expensive cover most logic operations within them not just boolean operations.
