Skimming through [1], I found: "As an owner of a Zedboard (and half a dozen others FPGA boards) I recommend other readers disregard this advice. It is not a good starting board as is has a very, very steep learning curve, much steeper than any other FPGA I've used, It is also very, very expensive (but you do however get a lot for your $). The FPGA build times are very long too, especially annoying when you are just starting out.
However, if you are interested in Programmable Logic logic, try a Papilio One from Gadget Factory - equivalent to a quarter of a million logic gates for a $37.50 + p+p. An open source AVR compatible processor core is available, so you can still develop with it as though it is an Arduino, and even make changes to the internals of the CPU." Google found [2] "The Papilio is an Open Source FPGA development board based on the Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA" As usual, the open source part seems... questionable. No mention of BSD, Plan-9, Hurd, etc. Closed source device driver, it mentions an open source driver but doesn't provide a link. "The Xilinx tools such as Impact and the EDK do not support FT2232D based programmers nor does Xilinx provide any method to add support for non-Xilinx programmers. " I'm guesing the Xilinx tools are closed source. Various things are not tested or outright not working. Has anyone looked into this board? Is it really usable, or just another board that promises more than it delivers? [1] http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/01/28/2347255/ask-slashdot-best-electronics-prototyping-platform [2] http://papilio.cc/index.php?n=Papilio.Hardware _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
