Is it at all practical for home-builders on a very limited budget to develop DSP type functions, such as filters and the like, on FPGAs? Reading around, I get the impression that experimenters that do it have access to high powered tools, through their work or some other way. Tools such as Matlab allow you to enter filter parameters, and out comes the VHDL, but Matlab with all the associated toolboxes is a tad pricey for the home brewer.
Handcoding a FIR filter looks like an impossibly hard task, or is that just me?