Hi. I want to get my brain around USB interfaces, how to design the hardware and the software, and eventually to find what economic hardware solutions are available, and how USB hardware interfaces can be arranged to make the best use of generic USB drivers to minimise problems associated with driver installation.
It's not something that I've been able to investigate in the time-limited projects that I've done as an electronic designer, and so I've tended to use RS485 interfaces or other alternatives. I've decided that It's high time that I understood USB, so I'll pick up the knowledge by occasionally dabbling with it at home over a period of a few months which is something that works OK for me.
I'm not very good at reading screeds of technical description and retaining it in my memory, so I need to get my hands dirty with some experimental design and coding that I can interact with to get the concepts anchored in my mind. I'm reasonably competent in C, C++, VHDL and Verilog, and can code quite swiftly.
To kick off, I'd like to get an FPGA board with a RAM-based FPGA that can be configured via a serial or USB cable to a laptop. For my experiments, the board also needs a USB interface that passes the raw USB data stream directly to the FPGA, or it should be easily convertible to do so. The FPGA needs to be big enough to hold open-source HDL USB interfaces and to hold models that mimic the interfaces to common USB equipment like flash keys, printers and modems. Any suggestions? I'm aiming to keep the cost reasonable - $100 to $150 say - and I'm prepared to put up with the limitations of free software such as the speed-crippled Modelsim HDL simulator.