Sources for 8b TTL keyboards (Keytronics)

[Joachim Thiemann]

On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Jim Brain <brain at jbrain.com> wrote:
> $20.00 is a bit hard to find, but I think it's an apples to oranges
> comparison.  I used to see $49 Xilinx eval boards, but the best I can find
> this afternoon is $59.00
>
> http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavTop=2&NavSub=457&Prod=BASYS
>
> Still, that's a complete unit.  I would call $20 a better price, but not a
> "bargain".  For $40.00 more, you get access to gate level design that runs
> at many MHz.  Besides, you can get into AVR for $5.00, so I'd consider that
> a bargain over the TI stuff if we're going to call $20.00 a bargain over
> $60.00
>
> I think being able to get into any of these technologies for < $100.00 is a
> bargain.  In college, it cost $430.00 to get the HC11EVM, and the EVB was
> $99.00, which is > $100 in today's money.
> Jim

If you're lucky, see if you can find a Xilinx rep at a trade show or
(as it was in my case) University EE career fair.  I got (for free) a
Spartan 3e "Sample Pack" (with power supply) as well as a Parallel
port JTAG interface - all horribly outdated stuff (in FPGA terms; the
(c) on the CD with documentation is 2005) but good enough to allow me
to tech myself some VHDL.  I have a few ideas of projects with it, and
as I continue toying with their admittedly horrible, bloated,
win32-only software, this is mostly an educational exercise.  As such,
it works well enough.

Joe.
-- 
Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem