Terasic DE5-NET

[vincei]

https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&No=526

Is buying one of these Altera boards used a lost cause?  It has a large Stratix V onboard.

I spent a significant amount of time recently trying to find out what tooling there is out there to make use of one of these.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that unless you're willing to hand Intel/Altera almost $4000 annually for Quartus, buying one
of these on the used market for a couple hundred dollars is the height of folly for a hobbyist. Am I way off base here ?

It just seem wrong that this type of hardware is destined for landfill when it could be re-purposed by hobbyists for a second life.

If there's a solution for using one of these post here or DM.

Thanks,
Vince

[vincei]

I did a search of the forum before posting and didn't see anyone discussing this board.

[RoGeorge]

Vivado is for Xilinx.  It is free to download and use for home/educational use.
Quartus is for Altera.  Same, free for home/educational.

For the board in the link, it's too much for an absolute beginner.  Learning FPGA is very hard, so start with something simple.  There are $10-$50 FPGA devboards for learning.  No other hidden costs or subscriptions.

This site helped me a lot with the first steps:
https://www.fpga4fun.com/

[vincei]

Hi George,

 Do you really think I'd be asking about this specific board if I was a beginner? There's a reason I'm asking and there's a reason I'm interested in a board with 4 10G SFP's. Because it is not beginner friendly or doesn't suit your personal fancies that doesn't exclude us talking about more advanced topics on this forum, does it ?

-Vince

[asmi]

Hi George,

 Do you really think I'd be asking about this specific board if I was a beginner? There's a reason I'm asking and there's a reason I'm interested in a board with 4 10G SFP's. Because it is not beginner friendly or doesn't suit your personal fancies that doesn't exclude us talking about more advanced topics on this forum, does it ?

-Vince

If you are not a beginner, why are you asking those questions? You should know answers then. If you don't like the answers - well, tough life.

If you buy an eval board, it typically ships with some sort of voucher for a device-limited version of their IDE. The catch here is Altera provides time-limited license, while Xilinx provide a version-limited license. The latter is obviously better because you can use that version ad infinum, for example I own a Genesys 2 board with K325T device which I bought like 3 years ago, and I still can make new designs for it, using whatever latest version of Vivado was at the time I redeemed my voucher.

But that also means that whenever you a buy such a board second-hand, you aren't going to have such a voucher, so unless you acquire the license some other way, that board is as good as an e-waste for you because you aren't going to be able to use it. Even here things are easier with Xilinx because you can only buy it once, and you will be able to use that version forever, while Altera's license is a time-bomb which will require constant upgades to maintain it's functionality.

The cheapest dev board with 10G MGTs that I know of is Digilent's Genesys 2 board, it is now $1099 (was $999 when I bought it), and it includes abovementioned voucher. It doesn't come with SFP+ cages, but there are FMC daughterboards which have them, or you can make one yourself if you so desire.

[RoGeorge]

Hi George,

 Do you really think I'd be asking about this specific board if I was a beginner? There's a reason I'm asking and there's a reason I'm interested in a board with 4 10G SFP's. Because it is not beginner friendly or doesn't suit your personal fancies that doesn't exclude us talking about more advanced topics on this forum, does it ?

-Vince

You were talking in your OP about the price of a Vivado subscription for an Altera FPGA.

I took the time to explain to you which is which, then you went back, edited your OP including what you learned from my answer, and then throw at me rhetorical questions, pretending you are some kind of expert, and complaining this forum is not beginner friendly?  So you are a beginner after all? 

Nevermind, I've added you to my ignore list.