Arty A7: Artix-7 FPGA Development Board for Makers and Hobbyists (Arty A7-100T)

Documentation and examples are well written and easy to understand compared to competitor FPGAs.

Very good lab FPGA board. Very powerful, lots of PMOD connectors, enough LEDs, buttons and switches, and can support a Microblaze/soft ARM CPU. Well supoorted by Vivado Webpack. Not many examples for this board, so it isn't for learning FPGA programming. But there is enough to get started with this model if you are not new to the field.

As a beginner learning about FPGAs it's hard for me to write a meaningful review. Learning through a Udemy course. Chose Xilinx because the software toolchain seems better. Free version is great for a beginner.

Quand je l'ai acheté il était à 120 euros (et le prix est monté à 140 depuis), et j'ai reçu le modèle 410-319-1 qui est supérieur au 410-319, donc j'ai eu de la chance! Le cable USB-micro USB n'est pas fourni, pensez à en avoir un sous la main!

Ottimo prodotto

First thing I liked about the Arty was that I was surprised by the size, it is about 25% smaller than I imagined which is good. Another thing is that it can be DC powered by an external DC barrel jack power supply -- so no more USB power issues. I used the "KFD Power Supply 12V 3A" from Amazon. It's got JTAG over USB so you can debug Microblaze projects over USB without requiring an expensive JTAG programmer. Some things I don't like about it are mainly the online reference manual and instructions which are pretty unclear and perhaps not very well organised for novice users. For example links to useful information aren't easy to find and there is no simple pin reference, you've got to troll through their high level manual or low level schematic -- personally I like looking through the XDC file as things are more organised than a schematic even though its not 100% human readable. You need to be careful to select the correct part (XC7A35TICSG324-1L) which wasn't obvious from the get go -- so I wasted many minutes of synthesis getting it right.

This dev board works well and Digilent support is excellent. But it could have been much better with video, audio or Bluetooth interfaces. For these you'll have to buy PMODs. The PMOD-VGA costs extra and takes up 2 x PMODs. A built in HDMI interface would have been better and could be fitted in place of 1 PMOD. Also, a bluetooth interface would have been preferable to the Ethernet interface. I don't think this would have increased the price. (I have a £50 Spartan7 dev board with HDMI and bluetooth). However the Artix is more powerful.