Cyclone III FPGA starter kit or cyclone II starter development kit?

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, I have been programming AVR chips for a while but now I want to get into something more complicated with more stuff to do and heard about FPGA. I was wondering witch kit I would learn better with Cyclone III FPGA starter kit or cyclone II starter development kit or if you think if there are better learning kits out there you would recommend, also if there are any good books from experience that teaches VHDL clearly.

[Altera_Forum]

the Cyclone II Starter Kit is probably better because it has 0.1" pitch headers where as the Cyclone III has a Samtec connector "HSMC" slot. the Cyclone III family has more RAM blocks and multiplier blocks, but the Cyclone II Starter Kit comes with a reasonable sized FPGA 

 be sure to check out the kits from Terasic too:  http://www.terasic.com.tw/en/

[Altera_Forum]

The Terasic DE-0 board looks interesting. It has a mid-size Cyclone IV on it, with two 0.1" headers, as well as RAM and a USB interface. I don't own one, but if I was looking for a cheapie dev board, that would be towards the top of the list. I do own a DE2, with a 2C35 on it, and I have been very pleased with it.

[Altera_Forum]

I heard about the DE0- nano before but it didn't seem like it had something to teach you how to program more like it has some settings set for some stuff on a control board that you install on your computer, does anyone know about the DE0-nano version because I'm trying to save as much money as I can or would the terasic DE0 board be a better choice?

[Altera_Forum]

DE0-nano would be fine to learn on if you have LEDs, seven-segment displays, push buttons, etc that you could connect to the header pins. you will want to start by learning an HDL and the tool flow, neither of which really require a specific board

[Altera_Forum]

Check out Ebay, they have some usb blasters and very inexpesive kits that are made by third party vendors. Some as cheap as thirty bucks

[Altera_Forum]

I noticed that on ebay there was some really cheap boards that I might consider buying later on but I'm trying to look for a kit that has projects and tutorials with it to help learn how to program FPGA and to understand the language.

[Altera_Forum]

How do you get the MAC address of the Cyclone III starter kit? I want to fix an address to my router ( it requires the MAC) since I have a number of other devices that need router access at the same time.

[Altera_Forum]

It depends on the software you are running on the Cyclone III kit. With most of the examples the MAC address is generated in a function called get_board_mac_addr() in network_utilities.c

[Altera_Forum]

OK, Thanks, but I'm surprised. I thought that MAC addresses were unique to each piece of hardware that had internet capability. For example if I ipconfig - a on my PC the IP addresses can change but the MAC assigned to my hardware box never does.

[Altera_Forum]

Actually on a PC you can change the MAC address on most network cards if you can directly talk to the chipset. On the starter kit the Triple Speed Ethernet engine uses two registers to store the MAC address and it is set by the software at run time. 

The kit demonstration applications read this MAC address from the on board flash (in the last sector, if I remember correctly) and give it to the MAC.

[Altera_Forum]

After thinking about this, I decided my purpose was not to change the MAC but just to find out what it was. So I started up my Cyclone III and waited until it picked an IP address. Then I logged into my router and picked "Display attached devices". There in the list was the IP of the Cyclone III and its MAC address. Now I can fix this IP and MAC in the router and the Cyclone will always have the same IP.