hello i talked to my cuz today and i had no idea that he was an electral engineer. so he just finished collage and i get his old equipment. one of them is a Digilent Spartan 3 board
and i get this for free.
do any of you have it?
is it easy to program? and good documentation?
is it easy to use? even for someone completely new to microcontrollers?
Absolutely not. That's like a fine mono filament blade in the hands of a wrestler, you're not gonna be able to do much with it but cut yourself in half. You need to learn VHDL or a similar language to program something like a Spartan 3 board. It's an FPGA, truly programmable hardware. If you want basic microcontroller experiance, dive in with a PIC or AVR, send me the Spartan 3!! I've already downloaded the development software for play I might actually abe able to use it =) The 'software' of an FPGA is actually logical blocks of real world hardware that can be routed and designed to perform functions similar to a microcontroller, only much much faster. An average PIc or AVR runs at an approximate speed of 20MHZ maximum. The Spartan 3 board you listed will hit 500+ mhz
That's...Far, far beyond the kind of thing you're looking to do, like others have said, but if you want to give a whack at it, just try searching VHDL tutorials online, or find a book. I tried reading some, but they boggle my mind as of yet.
Or you could try to figure out how to program this PIC16C57-compatible IP core on it: **broken link removed**