Digilent Basys 3 Artix-7 FPGA Trainer Board: Recommended for Introductory Users

Good price

I was looking for a xilinx based board to do some testing with and bought this one. It's smaller than I thought, but is high quality. The manual from digilant is great and the info on what pins the peripherals are connected to is readily available. Overall a really good board to get to learn FPGA .

Me agrada la versatilidad en su programación, su tamaño, su costo y la rapidez en el envío.

I've been out of college for a good while now and haven't worked with FPGAs since. I'm looking to change the direction of my career which may involve current knowledge of FPGAs so I purchased this board to refamiliarise myself.

Being a professional software engineer for 3 decades, having experience with CPLD design in the 90s, I recently revived my interested in building circuit boards, soldering, and updating my hardware knowledge. Just for fun.I found digital design with Verilog and VHDL a steep learning curve. Hardware is inherently parallel, and understanding the application of VHDL for FPGA design is different from traditional programming languages, even though the syntax may look similar.This board has all the features I require to get me started on the practical tutorials. Simple to use, well documented, lots of I/O on board and the 7 segment display for more advanced output - all help to get an exampled design up an going. The Artix-7 is quite capable compared to other boards using Spartan 3s. The only negatives are:1) the VGA output instead of a modern digital graphics output port. Getting the output to work with any modern LCD display required buying and testing quite a few VGA to HDMI converter cables to provide a decent display.2) lack of general RAM for use by soft microprocessor cores (e.g the MicroBalze or RISC-V)For more practical designs I will use the Sparkfun Alchitry Au boards or the Diligent Arty Z7 (which is on a $100 off sale right now).However, paired with VHDL BY EXAMPLE by Blaine Readler I am having a lot of fun.

Program website seems a little archaic, install was a massive time-sink on Linux, and frankly part of the problem is that I don't know where to begin. I'm just going to use Arduino's Vidor instead, I heard Quartus is less apocryphal. I'll come back to this eventually.

Not the cheapest FPGA board for doing the basic sort of stuff I've used it for so far, but it's a nice fully featured platform- 4 PMOD, very nice dip switches, etc. Glad I have this board to play with, and worked seamlessly with Vivado (once I struggled through getting Vivado itself running)

I already had the Xilinx software installed and I was doing the first project within half an hour. Would have liked more I/O and maybe I should've got the next higher-up board as I have some FPGA background but still this is a very capable device and board. I'm looking forward to get it talking to my Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards!