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Development / Evaluation Boards Missing "Stuff"

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One of the things folks often complain to me about is purchasing a development or evaluation board that is billed as having all sorts of goodies like a USB Interface (for example) ... but when it arrives they discover that although there's a USB connector the kit isn’t equipped with a driver, or something else is missing.

So (a) has this ever happened to you and (b) please write reviews on any development / evaluation boards or kits you've used telling the rest of us what is good (or bad) about them...

Discussion started by Clive Maxfield , on 21 October 12:44 PM

Replies

Prasad Pandit, 2011-02-22 12:07:39

One more, if you are more focused towards Embedded System development rather than developing cores then you should check Altium's NANOBOARD 3000. Its a cheap and feature rich board.

Prasad Pandit, 2011-02-22 08:53:12

I also would like to add about DE1 board that, some of the prebuilt projects in tutorials are faulty. For an FPGA beginner it is difficult to find how to work on all features like audio ic I2C interfacing, Using NIOS II. The documents they have given are also a bit hard to understand. Else its a good one to start.

Prasad Pandit, 2011-02-22 08:49:03

I am using Altera DE1 board. Its a nice Development board with Cyclone II FPGA. A low cost and fast FPGA with 20000 LEs (can work perfectly till 250 MHZ). The board has onboard VGA, SERIAL, SDcard, PS2, Audio line in/out interface. 10 toggle an 4 push buttons, four 7-seg displays, 14 leds.Two 40 GPIO pin-outs. Onboard 8MB SDRAM, 4MB flash, 512KB SRAM. USB-blaster JTAG-programmer. As a beginner I found it as a very good start for basic FPGA development and also for audio and video development. Also Altera has a large IP core library and NIOS II Softcore processore for SOPC designs. I am now developing my own 4-bit processor, I know it sounds funny. But I love developing my own cores.

The only feature it doesnt have is RJ45 port, Higher memories like DDR2 or DDR3 interface, USB interface for any other device.

If you want a bit more features then you can go for DE2-115 its a nice board.

I love my DE1.

Brad Mosch, 2011-01-17 13:00:38

I started a discussion called "Basys2 Problems" that might fit this category.

- Brad

Antti Lukats, 2009-11-04 00:47:02

Xilinx own FPGA boards
======================

Well Xilinx has been adding "embedded usb jtag" now (again much later than Altera), but because it seems the "jtag programming" seems to be managed by a very badly working team in xilinx, they are not able to provide auxilary debug/terminal communication over the on board embedded jtag, so while those board have all necessary hardware to provide both jtag AND terminal like communication because of lack of software and driver this isnt possible. So only some very latest Xilinx boards have both embedded JTAG and USB UART on board (so two USB connectors), Altera (or at least Terasic supplying altera kits) has been able to offer both JTAG and "virtual console" over single on board embedded jtag interface.

Probably one of the first Xilinx boards with both embedded JTAG and usb-uart is SP601, but this board has only 8 user I/O with low cost connector accessible, so there is another problem introduced by Xilinx.