[Coco] Howto for Altera DE1?

[Steven Hirsch]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, Stephen Adolph wrote:

> 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.

I have moderate experience with FPGAs and years of electronic technical 
background.  The problems I ran into are what might be expected at an 
early phase of this project, and all of them could have been avoided by a 
simple "cookbook" that explained the steps.  I do not fault anyone for not 
writing that when it's still under development.  The key point is that 
folks who did have the knowledge stepped right up and helped me out 
(thanks!).

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

It's bluntly impossible to "tank" the hardware by means of software. Not 
sure what your point is.

> 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.

I'm sure the project will get there.  I'm an "early adopter" and hopefully 
my experiences will help guide the eventual howto.




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