It was an enthusiast board when I bought it (~2004) But the board I'm using now is this, which definately has the space for a serial port (but would probably mess up the port layout), but instead has a serial port header on the motherboard (but I don't have a 10-pin IDC to DB9 cable adapter, so I have a set of wires running out of my pc through an empty pci slot).

I have boxes and boxes of misc. ports, connectors and such, yay for ex-comp enthusiasts off loading there stuff on you

I remember when the IBM location that my uncle worked at was shut down, they gave their employees all of the equipment they couldn't sell off; I ended up getting a whole bunch of goodies from that Various computers, cables, connectors, test equipment, etc. All very old, but still usable.

Yeah I have my grandpa's old IBM aptiva, it kicks a. I plan on sometime figuring out the media bay's pinout so I can hook it up to a new comp for the lulz.

Back on topic: I will hopefully order a full kit next week to make sure that everything is in order with Newark Electronics. Please don't order a kit yet as I may add/remove/change parts, depending on how things go (I'm also thinking of changing what programmer to build with the kit, as I know some of you don't have serial/parallel ports).

I'd be happy to put together a price-optimized FPGA dev kit, if anyone would be interested. Note that it would certainly be quite expensive thoguh.

It would be WAY over the $45-60 range people on this forum are willing to spend

I've worked with the Spartan-3 board, which is a decent one. I see it for about $120:

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=S3BOARD

I have that exact board (it was $150 back in 2006 when I bought it; I use it as a logic analyzer).

Now I use an Altera DE2 board for college ($300 academic pricing)

As for the kit: Does everyone have a spare mini-usb cable that they don't mind cutting up and using for a project?

Hahaha, noob. I use one that's about $1.6K:

http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/XUPV2P.htm

That is a seriously tricked out board, but $1.6K is overpriced for the specs

Yeah, but have a PPC coprocessor and a stick of RAM for your working set is very nice.

I went to order the kit today and lo and behold Newark is out of all of the microcontrollers in the kit with an insane lead time for all of them Bear with me while I try to find yet another supplier for parts...

Argh, that is a pain in the neck. Hope you can find an equally-cheap, in-stock microncontroller supplier. :/

This is becoming a wtf ordeal; neither Mouser, Newark, MCM, Allied, nor Jameco have the microcontrollers in stock. Digi-Key has 16 left, which are probably going to be all gone very soon (plus they have a huge mark-up on all their microcontrollers) I'm assuming a company/university needed the ENTIRE internet's supply of 18F4550's and 16F877's for something very, very important.

Well, Newark has the 16F877's and ATMEGA8's back in stock (though in low quantities), so I went ahead and ordered the kit (I didn't buy the 18F4550 as it still has a 1 month lead time; hopefully that'll change or I'll have to replace it with an 18F2550 for the kit). I'll let you guys know the final cost/shipping time once I get it in the mail.

Hooray, can't wait to hear about it. I lol'ed at the comic.

I got the kit in today; the box it came in was HUGE:


Lots of envelopes and miniature boxes:


Said materials laid out on the floor:


Massive waste of packaging:








And of course there were glitches; the solderless breadboard is TINY, only has 270 tiepoints (it's listed as having 350 ), some of the LEDs aren't diffused, and the jumper wires have yet to come in (they're being shipped directly from the supplier). Overall though Newark ships very quickly (on par with Newegg) and cost $13 to ship that big ass package.

Is it really worth buying jumper wire? I just use a cheap reel of wire and cut it to length as required, though admittedly I could do with more than one colour.