Bitcoin miner - Is it possible?

I've seen an example that used an Arduino to control an FPGA to do bitcoin mining. The overall hash rate was pitifully slow - lower than would have been achieved by simply running a GPU miner on the PC. As an academic exercise it's certainly feasible (but a lot of work and also significant costs) but it is nowhere near sensible and would never recoup the cost of making and operating it let alone earn any money for you.