I am wondering what you could do to make my* easy to use.
One thing is to make things easier to use for Windows users. TinyFPGA is set up to use the Atom editor and the apio plugin, which makes things a bit simpler, but apio is currently rather limited. A better version of apio and its Atom plugin would be helpful.
You could make uploading bitstreams easier by supporting drag and drop like the Fomu device is going to.
There are a lot of projects that use Makefiles, cross-compilers, etc. that won't work with apio and aren't currently available to Windows users. One option may be to use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). I have tried that and it works for at least some cases. Support for using that in Getting Started guides, etc. may be helpful.
Better tutorials on Verilog and accessing various hardware would also be useful.
I also think we need better ways to communicate with other open fpga users. Different boards have their own forums reducing the number of users that visit them. A common forum for mystorm, tinyfpga, fpgawars, icoboard, icecreaker, fomu etc. would be good it it could be arranged, with sections for issues with specific boards. Other communication channels seem a bit random. There are a few twitter accounts that I get useful information from, particularly OSS FPGA Tools (@ico_TC). I am not sure how much the IRC channels get used. The #openfpga one seems to be used a fair bit, but mainly by board and tools developers. I have not seen active Facebook groups on open fpga. I would like to see these things used to encourage more collaboration on projects. I have worked on a few collaboration in the last year, but I don't see much evidence of it happening. Perhaps there are other communication channels I haven't seen.
I would be interested in what sort of simple hardware you are thinking of for the my* board(s).
There are lots of tools that I would like to see improved. As a start it would be good to see the BlackIce examples changes to used nextpnr-ice40, as that is so much better than arachne-pnr and the GUI can be used to show users what is going on under the hood.
The icestudio tool is a nice idea but from my brief experience with it, I don't like the unreadable Verilog that it generates. That could be improved.
I would like to see better support of a package manager such as FuseSoC. It does not currently look very easy to use that, but the idea of being able to share IP cores and not keep reinventing them is a good one.
Another idea that might be useful is to have a Risc-V SoC that is supported by the Arduino IDE, which could be a starting point for Arduino users. (Not the current BlackIce Arduino support by the STM32 Arm CPU). Users could then configure the SoC or add new Verilog modules to support extra hardware.
In general I think we need to explain what the advantages of using FPGAs over micro-controllers are, better than we currently do.
There seems to be a sizeable group of people that want to build their own FPGA boards. If my* was very simple and cheap, it could act as a starting point for them.
