Elbert V2 - Spartan 3A FPGA Development Board

Great board for a beginner! So many on-board I/Os to play with. No programming device needed. Works great on Linux. Free synthesis software (Xilinx ISE Webpack).Awesome price!Buy this and a good book such as the Palnitkar and you are all set to start with FPGAs!However, I agree with z3r07, I could not use the constraint file provided by Elbert as-is. Also, you cannot use Xilinx' latest version of ISE with it, you must use an older version (I use 9.2, but I think 10.x works too).

This is a great first FPGA board. After having a lot of fun with microcontrollers, I had been interested in FPGAs for quite some time. The best way to explain it for someone new to the game is that while you tell a CPU what to do, you tell an FPGA what to be. I found this difference very intriguing. Unfortunately, until recently, the barrier to entry has been pretty high and there hasn't been much information available for the hobbyist, so I was a little hesitant to make the investment. However, at it's price, the Elbert is almost a throwaway purchase. If I didn't use it, I'd have spent less than a typical dinner out, so it seemed like a safe jumping off point.Several enterprising makers are committed to bringing FPGAs to a wider audience with projects like the Papilio and the Mojo which sell for under $100 and provide a lot of hobbyist-friendly projects and tutorials. Unfortunately, neither of the above boards includes any peripherals beyond some basic buttons and LEDs, if that. To add peripherals, you must buy an external add-on board that plugs into the FPGA board's headers. Generally, these peripheral boards add quite a bit to the price of entry, and the total was a little more than I wanted to pay for something I was still unsure if I would get into. Elbert, on the other hand, includes a number of built-in peripherals and connectors, including dip switches, push buttons, seven segment displays, VGA and audio output, and an SD card slot.If there's any knock against Elbert, it's that it's big brother Mimas costs only slightly more. For this, you will get basically the same peripherals, plus 64MB of DRAM and a *much* more capable FPGA. The XC3S50A FPGA in the Elbert is tiny; probably one of the most basic chips you can buy. Many of the IP cores you'll find online won't fit in Elbert's limited resources, and honestly a few of the peripherals are a little bit ambitious to include on an FPGA this size. The VGA port doesn't have enough memory to give it a decent frame buffer, and the SD card slot really requires a CPU to handle a filesystem, while only the tiniest of CPUs will fit on the Elbert. On the other hand, Elbert's limitations are not necessarily a bad thing because you need to learn the basics before you take off on any really ambitious projects, and having a limited platform forces you to do that.The other downside is that Numato doesn't offer quite as much guidance for getting started as some of the other FPGA boards. However, a lot of the resources you can find online, even those from the manufacturers of other boards, will apply to the board if you're willing to look past the superficial differences. Since I bought the board, Numato has also improved their own set of tutorials to get you started, but I still don't think they're as good for a beginner as other resources you will find. Their forums aren't very active but they do have some helpful information on them, including discussion of a project that makes both Elbert and Mimas programmable via Arduino. It definitely takes persistence, and nothing is spoon fed to you, but if you put forth the effort, you'll find that Numato boards provide a great value for the price.I also found a potential design flaw in the board because the FPGA shares its clock with the microcontroller that's used to program it. That means if you accidentally configure the FGPA's clock pin as an output, you can disrupt the clock and prevent the microcontroller from working. If this happens, you will be unable to reprogram the board and it's basically bricked at that point. Fortunately I discovered a workaround that I documented on my Github wiki. Basically if you short the FPGA's PROG_B pin to ground, it will prevent the FPGA from running and allow the microcontroller to initialize so you can upload a new design. If this happens to you, google for "unbricking elbert" for details.I will say of Numato that I have found them to be extremely helpful and responsive when I reached out for help. I initially suspected a hardware problem, and they sent me a replacement board free of charge. When I bricked the second board by uploading my design, they were very gracious and asked me to upload my design so they could help me diagnose the problem. Once they explained the problem I came up with the workaround of shorting the PROG_B pin and restored both boards to operation, so it was a successful collaboration. After I shared my workaround with them, they also posted it on their website so other users could benefit.

This is an awesome development board! It works with Xilinx's free WebPack ISE 14.7 software, and is plenty powerful for exploring basic hardware design. I've used the 7-segment displays, VGA port, and built-in switches and LEDs using Verilog, and it all worked great. The Xilinx SW runs in Linux now as well as Windows. Downloading bitstreams to the device seems easier in Windows, but apparently it works under Linux for some people (I'm still trying).I highly recommend this for anyone wanting to get started with developing designs for FPGAs. There are enough gadgets on-board to get you up and running quickly, but keep you entertained as your skill grows. Make sure you visit Numato's website for important downloads, including configuration tools, manuals and schematics.

I purchased this board for my personal use, to learn Verilog. In my opinion, what was missing from the other reviews (and from the product description) is that this board ships without any power cord or even a USB 2.0 cable, which is needed to connect it to a laptop. The assumption is that everyone will have a cable available, or will need to buy one separately (which is what I had to do). I found this very disappointing, because almost every other product that I have purchased in the past included cables.. Customer service was not very helpful either. I would have expected a little better for a board I paid $30 for...

It's nice little board for starting off with, and very affordable. The big problem with it is the super-low-end Spartan XC3S50A... if you try to do something complex, you'll run out of space pretty quick. Numato also offer the Mimas v2, which has a larger, newer FPGA, which should be a bit more capable.

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works great!

I think good product and good price, I've gotten quite out in my studies recommend ....