Cheap dev board

[wheedal]

Altera/Arrow is doing a number of 4 hour seminars world wide showing nios + cyclone 3 platforms. The punchline is that they are offering the BEMICRO dev board with the seminar for $39US. Pretty cheap and might make for a interesting toy to play with. It has a 80 pin header on it to allow you to hook your own target PCB's. 16KLE's.

Going to our area's next week.
http://www.arrownac.com/offers/altera-corporation/bemicro/registration.html


-Dal

[Talus]

Looks neat, if small :) the site says "80 pin edge connector" and given the size of the board, that must be pretty fine pitch. I couldn't find any large image or schematics or PCB drawing of the device, at least without registering.

[wheedal]

Back from the demo. Mostly sales pitch (big surprise), but they did give out the boards and had a little hands on session tacked on the end. Its a pretty small device, but could be useful for something cool, (with modification). They didn't include a boot flash on the board (I guess to keep their NIOS core protected somewhat), but the Hi-tech guys did leave an unmarked footprint on the PCB. So it looks like you should be able to change the MSEL jumpers and populate the EPCS part. Hitech used the same 80 pin header as they did for an arm dev board so you can use the same breakout target board with this kit. The socket is a Samtech part, the schematic is on the Hi-tech site, so you should be able to make your own target PCB fairly easily.

'Course, that's quite a bit of fuss for a 16K LE part...