Doppler development: community efforts, lowering barriers

Hi fellow doppler owners,
hi Johannes,

I’m Hatto from Germany and got into doppler (again) recently.
While I have my doppler since July '19, I must admit that I barely touched it so far (and I also have to admit that I’m a dev board hoarder, somehow).
Getting my spark ignited from various equipment tech news lately, I wondered what the doppler community came up with in the meantime, so I checked here just to find - nothing.
Now this really is an unfortunate state for such a great product. It looks like either progress on it stalled while FPGA dev tech got more and more easier, or people are just cooking things for themselves (if there is any other platform for doppler dev exchange that I haven’t come across, please let me know).
So if that is the case, I wondered (or better: am assuming) if this is related to the steep learning curve and wiring work to be done before the doppler can be of any use - both are points to contribute work on.
Given the first, some FPGA startup projects have been working on an approch much like Arduino, with hardware description libraries to drop in as we know it, and connect them via various busses (Wishbone e.g., which further brings us to the website opencores.org, a source for such modules). While this is clearly out of my scope, maybe there’s a way to implement this as a layer in front of all the IDE work, or maybe just pasting Verilog code together, I don’t know. But regarding the second point, what every doppler owner would surely benefit from, is a dev board (or merely: expansion board) where you drop in the doppler and instantly have peripherals like buttons, pots, encoders, a display, and some interface connectors (MIDI, maybe even another DAC) on the hand.
I’ve been planning such a board for a while now and wonder if there’s interest in the community to have this released. On the other hand, I’m curious what features you guys could come up with, to make this as versatile as possible.

Let’s keep doppler alive together!

Best, Hatto