This FPGA board is awesome and a lot of attention obviously went into the development toolchain. Vivado is a beast to download and install, but the Alchitry Labs IDE and the Lucid language hide all the complexity of Vivado and Verilog while you start to learn the ropes of FPGA development.

The kit provides everything you need to work your way through the Alchitry tutorials, then to experiment with external IO. You get a small discount for getting it all at once.

My only complaint is that the setup instructions don't mention the need for the FTDI driver on Windows. You need this in order to load a project onto the Au board, but it's not mentioned anywhere that I could find on alchitry.com. This oversight caused me several hours of frustration trying to get a non-functional product to work. This is important enough that I'm docking two stars from my rating.

Great manufacturing, easy to set up. If you are new to FPGA boards, this a real good choice. And also most of the advanced features can be accessed (like Vivado's tools).

A great kit for learning FPGAs. Tutorials are really good, the only complaint I had was I wish the Verliog tutorials were more up to date, as you'll have to learn that to continue your FPGA journey. But great kit, great interfaces tons of projects to get you started!

I have tried a handful of FPGA kits in the past, and have a little bit of familiarity with both Xilinx and Altera tools for "bare boards". The approach Alchitry takes is a good one, trying to remove all the nasty, time consuming "gotcha" impediments one usually faces in using the vendor tools directly. Coming up with 'Lucid', their variant of Verilog, to help in this goal is also a good idea... but it might have been more than this seemingly-small group of engineers at Alchitry can handle. There are issues with the tooling all over the place (especially on Windows). Have a look at the Github repository "issues" tracker, as well as their forums on the alchitry website. Now I get it, some will say "yeah but I can get around those issues because I know what I am doing". Yep, so can/do I....but that's not the point of a starter kit / learning kit for FPGA. The point is to have the user focus on the learning, NOT trying to solve different-but-same problems with Alchitry's tooling (vs Xilinx's tooling). e.g. The Vivado build progress not showing up in the Alchitry-Labs tool window. Or an errant, stale dependency being pulled into the A.L. tool's JAR file causing it to crash when a new project is created under certain JRE versions.

While I applaud the Alchitry org's efforts here, and this board IS a good value if you bypass everything (i.e. you are an experienced FPGA dev and want just the board), they have a significant way to go before they reach their intended goal with this product.

(it would also help if they were a lot more engaged and quicker to address reports of problems on their forum pages and their github tracker)

I mainly got this board for it's full fpga pinout exported mezzanine connectors (surprisingly, not a whole lot of boards offer this), didn't even bother with alchitry's toolset (imo- as it's not standard, not worth spending that time learning...) after installing the ftdi usb drivers, you can get vivado to recognize the FPGA by using the tcl command: "program_ftdi". the usb connection was... sporadic, so i had to reflow the usb connector. this fixed it. the schematic is nicely done, makes the process of designing custom hats all much better. Highly recommended for anyone who wants a mezzanine FPGA w/o breaking the bank

I used to work on Papilio Pro. They are good. But this is better. Easier in many ways.

I do miss something, though: a breakout board with a Qwiic connector and an HDMI connector, too. That would make life a lot easier.

But for now it is pure joy!

Peter

Convenient little kit with a nice set of tutorials backing it up. A great place to start if you're looking to get a toe in the door with FPGA development. Or, if you're interested in adding FPGA support to one of your projects, this is a great little kit to get up and running without too much trouble.