The world is full of surprises. The original goal behind engineering has always been to follow the latest scientific discoveries and turn them into tools that benefit humanity, even if only to some extent.

We work on projects and deliver results — some may take years, others just months — but it always comes down to how people perceive their usefulness. We’ve spent countless hours designing, prototyping, and building Vaaman, and perhaps we haven’t yet found the right way to communicate its true potential to the community.

When you dedicate almost two years of your life polishing a product at every level — alongside many others who joined the journey — it becomes about creating real value in people’s lives. We’ve seen many simple projects become extremely successful, and many complex ones, like ours, take more time to be recognized.

There’s certainly been a disconnect in how we’ve conveyed Vaaman’s capabilities, and we’re working on improving that every single day. In this industry, you identify a problem and solve it using your skills — whether that involves hardware or software.

What Problem Are We Solving?

One key issue in the FPGA space is the value gap. FPGAs are costly for the performance they offer, especially in consumer-facing contexts. We also realized that hardware is nothing without great software written on top of it.

When you dive deeper into FPGAs, they’re incredibly fascinating — you can do almost anything with them. But from a development perspective, they’re difficult to approach. The EDA toolchains are complex, and even simple development can take a lot of time.

That’s the very problem we aim to solve with Vaaman and the upcoming Vaaman Series.

The Vision Behind Vaaman

Vicharak’s core vision is to introduce Reconfigurable Computing Systems — hardware that adapts to the needs of software, in contrast to traditional instruction-based CPU architectures.

Vaaman is not just another FPGA dev board. It’s the foundation of an ecosystem. We’re introducing:

• Periplex – The world’s most advanced hardware peripheral interface system (built with a hardware-software co-design mindset).
• Gati – A fully FPGA-based AI accelerator architecture.

These tools will sit on top of Vaaman and reshape how people interact with FPGAs. Our approach is to make them accessible using simple C/C++ or Python-based APIs, allowing software developers to harness FPGA power without touching Verilog.

Clearing up Misconceptions

Many see Vaaman as just another FPGA development board. There’s also a common misconception that Xilinx is the only brand worth considering in the FPGA space. We’ve carefully chosen the right components at every level to offer the best possible value — hitting a $180 price point in a highly competitive market.

For too long, the FPGA industry has remained niche. Vaaman’s original goal was to democratize this powerful technology — to bring it to people who’ve never worked with it before. That’s where real innovation begins.

The Campaign and Beyond

While we didn’t reach our initial crowdfunding goal of $8000, we’ve consulted with Crowd Supply and decided to reduce our target and move toward campaign closure. We already have some internal funds available to produce the initial batch, so we’re fully committed to delivering all current orders despite the reduced funding total.

And, regardless of this campaign’s outcome, we firmly believe in the future of FPGAs and Reconfigurable Computing. If you identify the right problem and believe you can solve it, all that’s left is to keep working until you hit the jackpot.

And that’s what we’re going to do.

Final Words

In the end, we’re just a bunch of curious and passionate engineers from India — playing with high-level languages like Python and C/C++ all the way down to AND gates and OR gates.