I've really wanted to play with FPGAs but never really has good learning resources. This comment section is a gold mine! This is the kind of HN I like.
Can anyone point me toward good beginner dev boards? Doesn't have to be particularly powerful or anything, just cheap
Are you in the USA? I have a few Digilent Atlys [1] boards going to waste here. If you would like them I can send them your way. I don't have the power adapter, but it just needs 5v.
Definitely get something ICE that is compatible with the new open source tool chains. I recommend the Icebreaker[1], though you can get the Icestick for cheaper[2], it's not as good a deal.
The downside with the Terasic boards is the Intel tooling, it's pretty terrible and has bad SystemVerilog support. Vivado (the Xilinx software that you'd use with the Arty A7) is superior in my experience.
For a beginner I'd recommend going for the more expensive boards from a well known manufacturer (such as Digilent). You should have an easier out of the box experience with getting some basic stuff running. Yes there are some very cheap boards out there especially from places like AliExpress but you want to concentrate on learning an HDL and doing some designs not hours trying to get a poorly supported driver or toolflow to work or struggling with programming the thing because it uses some custom method that isn't well documented and doesn't just work with the FPGA vendor tooling.
ICE40 board directly from the FGPA manufacturer. It's cheap has an open source toolchain and works without any additional hardware. Just plug it in and go.
Can anyone point me toward good beginner dev boards? Doesn't have to be particularly powerful or anything, just cheap