Maker Shed has a CPLD starter kit. I’m kind of surprised. The $85 kit would be a great way to get started in digital design and an introduction to CPDLs. You should be able (pun as the software is called Able) to design up some complex digital logic, including state machine logic and test it out on the board.
The kit is also available at XGameStation for $160.
I’m trying hard to find a reason not to purchase this kit. I had done a lot of real digital design in my younger engineering years. I miss it and have not kept up with technology. This would be a great way to play around with the latest.
Some links I dug up while looking for a reason not to get this kit. By the way, I could not find a good excuse so I guess I will be ordering mine very soon.
- CPLD Brochure for the CPLD part used in the kit.
- The starter kit page at Lattice.
- CPLD in the kit is a c4064zc – Introduction from Lattice
- CPLD article at Wikipedia
- About Abel
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My notes on the subject from a while back: http://code.rancidbacon.com/LearningAboutFPGA
There are a lot of nice FPGA kits out there. In particular, Digilent has some nice ones at good prices. They use the Xilinx Webkit tools, a free download giving you access to Verilog, VHDL, etc. I used one of these as a dev platform for this project.
you can buy a real fpga boad on avnet for 49$
spartan3
much better value