[Coco] Howto for Altera DE1?

[Stephen Adolph]

you are joking right?

You don't see the pitfalls here?  People shell out a few hundred
dollars, with little to no experience with FPGAs and hardware in
general, and they want to play with a fast coco3.  There is a very
real chance that for the average user this can be very confusing and
possibly impossible, even if it seems simple to an EE.

How many ways can someone tank the hardware on a bare board
development system?  These cards are intended for lab environments.

The chances of success here (by success I mean that an interested
person could buy an FPGA board and have good chances of getting it to
work) are improved by

* limiting the hardware that is recommended
* controlling the number of variations that need to be documented
* minimizing any tasks that need one to be trained in FPGAs or
hardware in general.


Look, it is great and exciting to see people strive to an objective
and succeed, and everyone is happy to see something new come together.
 Naturally people will be interested.  However, making it
difficult/variable/challenging is just going to make everyone unhappy.

The easiest first step is to nominate a platform and stick with it.

I know very well that once someone has an RTL description of a COCO3
working, it can be ported to other FPGAs and other development cards.
  That is best left for electrical engineers.  Even it you succeed in
porting it, why would you choose to complicate things?


...Steve







On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> Stephen Adolph wrote:
>
>> Yah, I was really smoking it to suggest that the community pick a
>> hardware platform and stick with it.  What was I thinking?
>
> Not quite sure what you're getting at here? (and yes, I see the sarcasm)
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> |              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
> |  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"
>
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