Invisible wrote:
> So I know there's a fairly diverse set of people in here so... Anybody 
> have any experience with using FPGAs? It's something I've often thought 
> of playing with, but I have no idea (1) how much it costs, and (2) how 
> difficult it is to make something that works.

NB at it appears you are interested in getting into hardware, you might be
interested in looking at the Hammer board:

  http://www.tincantools.com/

Particularly their hammer kit, which comes with a very nice prototyping
board. I have one of these and it's easily the best of the various embedded
development kits I've had over the years. My previous platform for personal
projects (up until a few months ago) was the gumstix (gumstix.com) but
while it's OK for plug-and-play, I found doing custom hardware work with it
to be a bit of a pain (particularly due to its small connectors and overall
mechanical setup).

The nice thing about the hammer (apart from the dev board) is the fact it's
got a standard 40-pin DIP form-factor, meaning it's very easy to wire into
custom projects. Of course you lose some flexibility in that you have very
few I/O pins to play with, but currently it's got all I need.

-- Chris

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