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Comment by nategri | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty great. I have been wanting to get into FPGA programming so it's nice to know how low the "basement" price is for the essential equipment.

Can anyone else recommend any other cheap entry level boards?

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Well... "cheap" is relative, but the Ice40 boards from Lattice are reasonably priced IMO. And more to the point, there is a complete Open Source toolchain available for programming them. That's a big plus in my book.

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconduc...

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

My standard to-go-to FPGA is an Cyclone II EP2C5T144 development board. On a good day, you can find them for less than $5 on eBay.

You'll need a USB blaster to program them, which adds another $10 or so.

They are small, but they are still large enough to add a little CPU with a little RAM, plenty of hardware multipliers etc.

Pretty much anything from Digilent. I've got an old Spartan6 board that has a boatload of horsepower. If you want to get fancy, look at the Zedboard family -- FPGA wrapped around ARM cores.

I also recommend Digilent, but they are not bargain basement. They're education targeted, often focused on the lab, rather than non-hobbyist R&D boards, but not $10.

I always recommend the DE0-Nano. It's getting a little old, but it's basically all right there, open for use. I'm a fan of the Arrow DECA which has a complete assortment of neat odds and ends. Lastly Digilent's Arty and CMOD series are awesome depending on what you need.

I know this makes a few assumptions on what you mean by "Cheap", but I find sub $200 for FPGA boards to be pretty affordable when compared to the gamut.

There is a large list here (including this one): https://www.joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards The ICE40 chips are the ones supported by the open source icestorm toolchain.

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