Digilent Spartan 3 board

[davidbball13]

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

Digilent Inc. - Digital Design Engineer's Source

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?

 

[Sceadwian]

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

 

[3v0]

There is a LA project that uses it.

 

[ArtemisGoldfish]

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**

 

[davidbball13]

i am not going to give it to you it is a 100$ board!i dont know i might dabble with it but i dont think i will do much. or i will just sell it.

 

[3v0]

i am not going to give it to you it is a 100$ board!i dont know i might dabble with it but i dont think i will do much. or i will just sell it.

If you are going to get into the digital end of electronics in time you will want a LA. Why not keep the board and use it as such ?

If you do not have to make any major mods to the board to use as a LA you can also have it around to play with.