Cheap FPGA development boards from China - crap or not?

[TNb]

Hi! I found some ebay-sellers who sell quite cheap small-scale FPGA development boards(with ALTERA chips) from China, some of them are just old series and some are unknown to me, prices are very tempting, but I wonder if this is even working, I mean buying almost same board(maybe newer version) from official ALTERA distributor will be like 2 times more expensive. Does anybody have experience with it? Are they worth buying?

[AwArD_RzD]

6 month ago when i started to use FPGA/VHDL i saw these cheap board on ebay and the price is sometime under half the price from the development board from Altera.
I wanted to buy one but the CD, example, schematic was all in Chinese and even if they said the instruction/schematic/example was in English they had negative comment in the feedback saying all the thing was in Chinese.

The primary role of a development board is to learn the thing. To have a good base to work from and to be sure all the thing work properly it's a must, if you can find a board well documented in English with example/schematic well why not, you will save some $$$, but the thing i learned with my many purchase from china it's the price is low and there a reason, quality something is meh, shipping take a while and when you have question the vendor reply you with automated response and most of the time they don't know what they sell. For my part i stopped to look on Ebay for these board because no one seem to have one, i tried to find review in many forum blog but it's blank, there some but nothing exciting and it seem the people who review are not very passionate for these thing or they recommend to buy the real thing..   

If it's your first time with FPGA and you really want to put many hour to learn, nothing beat a real dev board from a known company, you will get support, example, quality part and you will know it's legit and working. The price maybe a stopper but these thing is not for everybody, when you start to touch exotic thing there always some $$$ involved but if you add the price for every part on the board you will see the price is low for what you get actually.

For my part i bought the DE0-nano, little thing under 100$, G sensor, 8 channel ADC, 32 meg sdram, eeprom, plenty of I/O, integrated blaster and a powerful Cyclone IV the downside is no lcd/seg display, only 2 push button 4 dip switch but i make and add what i need and it's a good reason to leave the screen to use my bench to make thing.

[Dago]

Often these cheap boards have next to no ground pins which is a real problem if you are attempting to use them for anything remotely high-speed.

A good rule of fist is to have a ground pin for every pin.

[TNb]

6 month ago when i started to use FPGA/VHDL i saw these cheap board on ebay and the price is sometime under half the price from the development board from Altera.
I wanted to buy one but the CD, example, schematic was all in Chinese and even if they said the instruction/schematic/example was in English they had negative comment in the feedback saying all the thing was in Chinese.

The primary role of a development board is to learn the thing. To have a good base to work from and to be sure all the thing work properly it's a must, if you can find a board well documented in English with example/schematic well why not, you will save some $$$, but the thing i learned with my many purchase from china it's the price is low and there a reason, quality something is meh, shipping take a while and when you have question the vendor reply you with automated response and most of the time they don't know what they sell. For my part i stopped to look on Ebay for these board because no one seem to have one, i tried to find review in many forum blog but it's blank, there some but nothing exciting and it seem the people who review are not very passionate for these thing or they recommend to buy the real thing..   

If it's your first time with FPGA and you really want to put many hour to learn, nothing beat a real dev board from a known company, you will get support, example, quality part and you will know it's legit and working. The price maybe a stopper but these thing is not for everybody, when you start to touch exotic thing there always some $$$ involved but if you add the price for every part on the board you will see the price is low for what you get actually.

For my part i bought the DE0-nano, little thing under 100$, G sensor, 8 channel ADC, 32 meg sdram, eeprom, plenty of I/O, integrated blaster and a powerful Cyclone IV the downside is no lcd/seg display, only 2 push button 4 dip switch but i make and add what i need and it's a good reason to leave the screen to use my bench to make thing.

hm... yeah, documentation is a must for me of course.
Although it is obvious that buying no-name board is stupid, but often you can see on ebay something like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cyclone-NIOS-II-Altera-FPGA-Development-Board-EP2C8Q208-1602-LCD-USB-Blaster-/261240585986?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cd326ff02

It's confusing. I mean there is logo on the board itself(not just chip), do chinese make such clear fake boards? Because I can't find this board on altera site.

[nuhamind2]

Just wondering, is it reliable to interface fpga and sdram through pin header. I've seen fpga dev board from ebay which use pin pin header to connect to various module including sdram.

[TNb]

By the way, asked seller about that board(link above):
they have only Chinese documentation also

So, I think bottom line for this topic - If you want to learn FPGA without hurting your brain - buy DE0-DE2 or something like that(unless you don't speak Chinese)

[dannyf]

Is the schematic in Chinese? is the device datasheet in Chinese?

If no, why would it make a difference?

[TNb]

Dannyf, everything on CD is in Chinese.

[dannyf]

everything on CD is in Chinese.

Meaning that one has to understand Chinese to understand the schematic? that one cannot find non-Chinese version of the datasheet?

Quite frankly, a schematic is a schematic (I would actually be surprised if that schematic is drawn in Chinese). Once you have that and the datasheet in your language of choice, you are in business.

Unless Altera has produced this device exclusively for the Chinese market and provides only the Chinese version of the datasheet, I see no reason that you cannot make it work.

[Alexei.Polkhanov]

I think it is a copy (or original) of old Altera board that is used in one edition of pretty old book called "FPGA Prototyping By Verilog Examples". Good book, but dev board is no longer sold by Altera, so thanks to someone it is still available on EBAY. Of course if you don't care about the book, probably board is not best choice. I am not sure if all sample code from the book will work on this board but I guess if you have a book you would recognize the board.

[TNb]

everything on CD is in Chinese.

Quite frankly, a schematic is a schematic (I would actually be surprised if that schematic is drawn in Chinese). Once you have that and the datasheet in your language of choice, you are in business.

Schematics and datasheet are ok, even if something is written in Chinese there. But what is interested is tutorials/examples and other guides. Maybe for very small board like DE0 it is not necessary, but for quite functional boards usually it has quite a lot of documentation of how to work with it in details. For me, not-very experienced student, this is very helpful to read all this stuff
But yeah, I suppose for very small boards it's not a big problem...

[AwArD_RzD]

everything on CD is in Chinese.

Meaning that one has to understand Chinese to understand the schematic? that one cannot find non-Chinese version of the datasheet?

Quite frankly, a schematic is a schematic (I would actually be surprised if that schematic is drawn in Chinese). Once you have that and the datasheet in your language of choice, you are in business.

Unless Altera has produced this device exclusively for the Chinese market and provides only the Chinese version of the datasheet, I see no reason that you cannot make it work.

Yeah a schematic is a schematic, myself i have many schematic in Chinese because it's the only thing you can have to see how they mounted the lcd or to know if they named the pin correctly, and it's not difficult when you have a mcu with 20-40 pin to trace what do what, but with FPGA i don't know maybe if they provide the pin assignment file you can save some time, but at this point you need to question yourself how you want to invest your time and your money, at 90$ it's a great deal but with 30-40$ more you have a Terasic DE1 ( or only 79$ if you can find someone in school to buy it) well documented and support from Terasic (and many many student who use this board in school).

[os40la]

I purchased this development board from an ebay store in China. It came with an Altera USBBlaster clone for around 30$US. There seems to be lots of people selling this board. It is mostly a older ALTERA fpga and not much else. I had no experience with fpga and was able to get it working with little effort. the leds and switches were easy to trace out to the pins so the non-existent Chinese documentation did not matter. This board is one of the most inexpensive boards to try out. if cost is a large issue.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Altera-CycloneII-EP2C5T144-FPGA-Mini-Development-Board-/250935949913?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a6cf2ba59
http://www.amazon.com/EP2C5T144-Altera-Cyclone-Development-Board/dp/B007YDTTEY

 If you need good examples then the Terasic DE0-Nano is a great board for the money. It even has an onboard programmer.

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=593

I don't know much about the xilinx fpga's and can't comment on them. I picked the Altera because my research seemed to indicate the Altera development platform was easer for noobs like me to understand and work with.

[AwArD_RzD]

I don't know what you want to do with your board but if you like to read, i recommend you a book i bought to learn digital design this summer.

http://www.amazon.ca/Digital-Design-Computer-Architecture-Harris/dp/0123944244/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381535075&sr=8-1&keywords=digital+design+and+computer+architecture

The exercise are fun, and you have the Systemverilog code along with VHDL, good way to learn one a see the other at the same time. it's under 100 $ and you can always find it on the internet to see if you like it.

The book take you to the transistor level up to a complete MIPS CPU at the end. If you like computer design you will love this book.

[Hardcorefs]

Hi! I found some ebay-sellers who sell quite cheap small-scale FPGA development boards(with ALTERA chips) from China, some of them are just old series and some are unknown to me, prices are very tempting, but I wonder if this is even working, I mean buying almost same board(maybe newer version) from official ALTERA distributor will be like 2 times more expensive. Does anybody have experience with it? Are they worth buying?

Go for it....
The schematic is  based on  electrical/electronic symbols NOT Chinese, generally these products are copies of existing items.
As regards other 'material',  9 times out of 10, it is badly written and incorrect, or indeed copied directly from material available from other sources.

There is also 'google translate', which will give you a very good understanding of the content should you require it.

and yes I have purchased 'Chinese' kit before and yes I have made my way thru. such manuals, consider it a learning experience.

[dannyf]

But what is interested is tutorials/examples and other guides.

Once you know what the device is, you can always google tutorials / examples for that device. If it is a general purpose fpga from a major vendor, there got to be tons of examples out there. However little support the ebay sellers can provide becomes irrelevant at that point.

[Volta500]

For anyone else looking for a dev board:
I do not have a lot of FPGA experience yet but a few months ago I was at the same place you are. The things to look at is documentation and what is on the board. You at least want a few buttons, at least eight LEDs and a expansion interface so you can connect your own hardware. Anything more like SRAMs can be very useful as they are hard to impossible to wire up yourself.

I have a pretty good experience with this one eBay auction: #150898941284 . The schematic and some example code is in a direct download link in the ebay auction, so you can read it before you buy the board. As far as I can tell with my limited VHDL experience the source code is pretty bad but it does work, although you should get your learning example code elsewhere. There is no big user constraints file with all of the pins setup in which they are connected on the board, although you can piece something together from the examples. Ill post mine online when i'm done. The schematic is pretty good and there is a hardware list with all of the onboard devices and to which pins they are connected. There even are datasheets for all of the chips on board included. Although completely redundant a nice touch.

You also need to get a USB Blaster with it, but do not! i repeat not get the cheap $8 ones! They are a piece of junk which will only waste you a lot of time debugging a stupid debugger.
You can get one of the clones for around $30 and that will save you ripping yourself a new asshole getting the thing to do what you want.   

[Dago]

You also need to get a USB Blaster with it, but do not! i repeat not get the cheap $8 ones! They are a piece of junk which will only waste you a lot of time debugging a stupid debugger.
You can get one of the clones for around $30 and that will save you ripping yourself a new asshole getting the thing to do what you want.   

What problems did you have with one? I have the "cheapest" USB blaster from ebay and it has worked 1:1 like the original as far as I know. Even got it working fine in Linux etc.

[Volta500]

You also need to get a USB Blaster with it, but do not! i repeat not get the cheap $8 ones! They are a piece of junk which will only waste you a lot of time debugging a stupid debugger.
You can get one of the clones for around $30 and that will save you ripping yourself a new asshole getting the thing to do what you want.   

What problems did you have with one? I have the "cheapest" USB blaster from ebay and it has worked 1:1 like the original as far as I know. Even got it working fine in Linux etc.

See my other post https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/altera-usb-blaster-works-only-once/
Plus that even in windows, SignalTap runs for only a few seconds, then gives hardware not found (or something like that, it was a few days ago). Maybe I just got a bad one but it is a very important link in the program/debug chain and if something weird happens you'll be debugging til the next blue moon. I have heard stories of the same thing happening with the PICKit clones sometimes programming some memory addresses with bad values on random locations. You think that there is something wrong with your code while it is the programmer that has not loaded it into the memory correctly. IMHO the few extra dollars/euros/whatever is not worth it