Diligent makes several boards for the educational market, prices in the sub-$200 range. (And the devices are small enough they can be used with the no-cost version of the AMD/Xilinx toolchain.)
I looked at nand2tetris a while ago briefly and I have the impression that it focuses too much on making complex circuits.
The target audience for nand2tetris are people that want to understand how the CPU works, and nand2tetris focuses too much on how to make logic using nand gates leaving other areas uncovered.
I recommend the Ben Eater youtube chamnel, he has a series of videos about building an 8bit computer, that in my opinion is much more informative for a curious person.
I like the iCEBreaker board, relatively cheap (80 euro), uses the digilent Pmod interface for add-on boards and the Lattice FPGA works well with OSS tooling (Yosys, Icestorm, ... for me this is a deal-breaker as I hate the proprietary IDEs).
Here are some project tutorials for it (should be easy to adapt to other hardware too):
There's a ton of of dev boards out there, but I would say to be sure to get something with hardware buttons and LEDs, as it really helps with some of the Hello World level of things, and many of the cheapest options won't have those.
I started messing with FPGAs with the DE0-Nano, but eventually got so frustrated with the tiny buttons that I upgraded to a DE0-CV, which I really enjoyed my time with. It has some 7 segment LEDs, physical switches, and buttons, and it also has a VGA port, PS/2 port, and Micro SD card slot, so you can build a pretty snazzy little PC if you want to.
Altera MAX 10 evaluation board is probably one of the cheapest options. You use quartus prime lite to configure it which is free, and better than the equivalent Lattice tools.
ooterness|2 years ago
https://digilent.com/shop/fpga-boards/development-boards/int...
For online courses, I've heard good things about Nand2Tetris but have not tried it myself.
https://www.nand2tetris.org/
arein2|2 years ago
The target audience for nand2tetris are people that want to understand how the CPU works, and nand2tetris focuses too much on how to make logic using nand gates leaving other areas uncovered.
I recommend the Ben Eater youtube chamnel, he has a series of videos about building an 8bit computer, that in my opinion is much more informative for a curious person.
progbits|2 years ago
Here are some project tutorials for it (should be easy to adapt to other hardware too):
https://github.com/icebreaker-fpga/icebreaker-workshop https://github.com/icebreaker-fpga/WTFpga
dyselon|2 years ago
I started messing with FPGAs with the DE0-Nano, but eventually got so frustrated with the tiny buttons that I upgraded to a DE0-CV, which I really enjoyed my time with. It has some 7 segment LEDs, physical switches, and buttons, and it also has a VGA port, PS/2 port, and Micro SD card slot, so you can build a pretty snazzy little PC if you want to.
Calloutman|2 years ago
MaKey|2 years ago
throttlebody|2 years ago
derefnull|2 years ago
there are a few different major brands
ge96|2 years ago