Getting started guide for Digilent Spartan 3E Starter Board?

Michael,

is just one of thousands of college courses which use the Digilent pcb.

I suggest you use a few minutes of time to google through, and find a course you like, and then do the labs.

I know that there is a huge amount of content out there (I have a Digilent pcb that I got for my personal use).

You just need to take some time, and effort, to find it.

Austin

Austin pointed out some great "getting started" ideas but please note there's a comprehensive users guide for the board that might not have come in the package from a direct-from-digilent starter board.

It has good information about what's on the board and - I believe - what's in the pre-loaded bitstream.

It's good reference information that will help with your journey but those other labs will help you get your feet wet in the Xilinx tool flow and beginning design.

- John_H

Michael

Some useful bits and pieces that might help on our website

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Darnaw1. The low cost FPGA development board.

Digilent provides no sw or documentation & a pretty junky usb cable with their kit. You should've bought it from avnet or nuhorizon, same board, same price. They include a large amount of useful sw & tutorial.

To be honest - I don't know where the board came from. I am the second owner. How do you tell where it came from?

-Michael

You don't. Digilent manufactures the board for their online store, for Avnet, for NuHorizons, and for Xilinx when they choose to sell direct.

In my opinion, the online information at xilinx.com is typically sufficient to work with the Xilinx/Digilent starter kits.

As for "junky USB cable" - a USB cable is a USB cable, isn't it? It's not like the typical engineer wants "Monster Cables" to provide their USB connectivity.

With the exception of the EDK starter kit, I don't think there's software involved with any of the starter kits. Webpack is online. The user guide is online. I'm happy with the boards I've purchased.

- John_H