Honored Contributor
Honored Contributortommythorn: if you've been to a unversity/college before then you might still be able to, i don't think they're too strict about it..
vjAlter: my reivew of the DE2-70 board well, after 2 weeks of playing around with my board, i think im ready to give you some first impressions of it. I'm not a pro or anything with using this board, so i've actually not used many of the features yet (NIOS, tv decoder, etc..). but here goes: There seemed to be an issue with the control panel that was included as part of the demo. Sometimes, the initialization files would fail to download. This problem doesn't always happen and seems to have corrected iteself lately. Also, with my board, if you touch the underneath of the board in certain areas, the DE2-70 board would reset itself. This was a pretty annoying problem since it happened quite a few times when i was moving around my board to connect it to various peripherals. I emailed terasic support about these 2 problems and they indicated that the first problem may be due to the USB blaster being 'unstable', no idea what that really means, but they did not really elaborate. The second problem they said that it might be due to the fact that some components are operating "at the limits of their tolerance" so the electrical properties of the human body might cause it to reset itself... a bit unsettling, and i hope these problems are not widespread.. the board seems to be working fine apart from those problems, all their demos and the other quartus projects i have seem to be working fine when i run them... although, since most of my projects were done for the DE2 board, it was a bit of a pain to migrate them to the DE2-70 board (pin assignments since defautl pin names are different).. they should have included a utility to do auto-pin reassignments to port DE2 projects to the DE2-70 board... Also, the samples and demos they give you are not very well-commented.. and many of their samples are now implemented using Nios instead of HDL. However, at the price fo 330 usd, the hardware you get is fantastic.. lots of IO ports, good FPGA, very solid set of components... only glitch is the area under where it says "power supplies by linear technology" which if you touch, it will spontaneously reset your board... so overall, even with all the little glitches that i mentioned above, i still think this is a really good board and i don't regret my purchase..
