The final goal of this project is to get a LIDAR like scan and show it on a GUI. So naturally it made sense to have an OS in the pipeline. Instead of dealing with USB connection to a PC, I opted for SPI between a rapsberry pi and a cyclone II FPGA. The FPGA provides the high speed logic and pin out count. The RPi provides the processing power and human interface. The SPI operates with a 500kHz clock. This is plenty for now.