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Comment by nwhitehead | Hacker News Reader

This article reminds me how much fun it is to program an FPGA. It's one of those mind-expanding exercises like learning logic programming or writing a purely functional persistent data structure. "Describing hardware" is quite a different way of looking at computation.

In case you want to try, I had good success playing around with the Altera DE2. It's got lots of "goodies" on the dev board and there are lots of existing class projects, class notes, etc. that use it. It's fun to get your own tiny CPU working and have it flash HELLO WORLD on the LCD display. You have to worry about bugs in your CPU as well as bugs in the program running on your CPU.

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The downside of the DE2 boards is that they're really stinking expensive if you don't qualify for the academic pricing.

I'd love to have a go at Verilog and/or VHDL, but I'm turned off by all of the sub-$100 FPGA dev boards because they basically just break out all of the FPGA's I/O pins to 0.1" headers and leave doing anything useful (as far as I/O goes) as an exercise for the reader.

There's the Mojo at kickstarter.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1106670630/mojo-digital-...

…which only has a single button for input, eight LEDs for output, and a couple comm lines with the AVR. Everything else is just broken out to headers.

How about this? http://dx.com/p/fpga-ask2ca-8-diy-learning-development-board...

You could also try the DE2's "little brothers", the DE1 and DE0, which cost considerably less but have less logic elements, DSP blocks, and peripherals.

Design wise, a $100 FPGA board with a bunch of peripherals won't actually be able to run many of them at once.

I have however designed a ~ $150 or so board (for prototyping) that has 10 bidirectional serial ports, a fast USB 2.0 port, and 20-30 general IO on 2mm headers, and runs on either a high or low precision 27MHz clock.

The rev 2 one also has an ethernet port, a TiWi module, and a RAM chip, and a better/cheaper clock, but those features add on a bunch of cost. Connecting the RAM makes for a much more expensive pcb.

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