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Thank your for your sugestions. The board got a total of 54 expansion pins, already incluiding the differential clock pair and this specific header i am talking about. It is not a super critical as there are already 2 dedicated input clocks and 51 IOs... but i like to ask people due to experience with other kits, as yours with BeMicro. Taking that in consideration, what would be your advice? Clock or IO (or both???)
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What you have proposed sounds sufficient.
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The board will be cheaper than DE0-Nano, but with a much smaller FPGA (no free lunch here). In a general perspective the users that we are targeting with this board are more general purpose hobists that are willing like to take a try with FPGA. When i say academic purposes are for are not strictly academic enviroment. For very local reasons, FPGA is almost non existent outside of professional hardware desing market. I live in Brazil and our taxes are 100% over electronic devices. So for a non-academic user the Altera DE0-Nano costs about 150 USD + 40USD of Shipping Costs + about 22 USD of custom clearance services, what starts to be a bit expensive for someone that is just thinking on taking a try on FPGAs.
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Good, it sounds like you have done your "Market Research" :)
One other thing you might want to consider is packaging. The DE0-nano and boards like it cannot be placed in an enclosure easily. If you think people will be interested in using these boards for control systems or "black boxes" for controlling motors etc, see if you can create a board form-factor that allows an enclosure to be used, but still allows access to the connectors. This is not a critical requirement, just an observation ...
Make sure to think about ESD protection and voltage protection on the I/Os going off the board.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
