Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by lvh on Sunday August 03, 2014 @04:42AM (#8127456)

I wish I knew what this person was using them for :-)

Has anyone made a similar comparative study of my biggest gripe with FPGAs: the quality of the (more or less mandatory) development software? In my experience, it's pretty horrendously terrible :(

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Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by joelby37 on Sunday August 03, 2014 @09:36AM (#8127862)

A few years back I was working on a PhD project that involved software defined radio for tracking wildlife in real time, which was an ideal FPGA project. With a limited budget I was keen to find the cheapest boards out there, and decided to start maintaining the list.

Sadly I don't have much time to use them from day to day any more, but still help people out when they email.

The comparison of development environments is a great idea which I'll definitely work on! They have a baffling range of paid editions with different featured and it's difficult to know what they all mean and why you'd want them. Thanks for the idea :)

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Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by willvarfar on Sunday August 03, 2014 @04:53AM (#8127469)

(Sorry for the down vote, meant to up vote; HN UI is prone to misclicks especially from mobile users)

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Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by InclinedPlane on Sunday August 03, 2014 @05:51AM (#8127533)

I neutralized yours, no worries.

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Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by linuxlizard on Sunday August 03, 2014 @09:11AM (#8127808)

Yeah, tools from hardware vendors are notoriously awful. Embedded debuggers (JTAG) are almost always terrible, too.

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Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by moher on Sunday August 03, 2014 @09:53AM (#8127899)

I agree, the whole toolchain is extremely bloated and still growing. My academic teacher simply refused to upgrade Xilinx ISE in the lab and the only thing that could force him to upgrade was eval board that wasn't supported by the old version.

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Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by sliverstorm on Sunday August 03, 2014 @01:06PM (#8128439)

Embedded debuggers (JTAG) are almost always terrible

Weeeell debugging is difficult by nature. No such thing as code stepping, all you can really do is examine waveforms.

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