What are some practical applications of an FPGA?

Question

I\'m super excited about my program powering a little seven-segment display, but when I show it off to people not in the field, they always say \"well what can you do with it?\"

Answer 1

True story.

They allow you to fix design flaws in the custom data-acquisition boards for a multi-million dollar particle physics experiment that become obvious only after you have everything installed and are doing integration work and detector characterization.