Mimas V2 Spartan 6 FPGA Development Board with DDR SDRAM

I bought this board to learn about Xilinx FPGA's and the Xilinx Development Environment. The board is great value for money. The only downside is it is slow to load through the USB...I also bought a couple of books... Blaine Readler - Verilog by Example, and Simon Monk - Programming FPGA's: Getting started with Verilog.The books are fairly basic and not very costly, but well worth it... I was up an running in no time at all... If you have experience programming micro in C, getting started with Verilog is not that hard... Also, if you have programmed for Windows in Visual Studio you will find the FPGA programming in Verilog's event driven paradigm to be very intuitive..All in all, a great product to get your feet wet with Xilinx FPGA's

good

A couple of months ago, I purchased a Mimas V2 from Numato Lab. I was looking forward to learning more about working with FPGAs, but so far I have done zero work.First, I'll say that the product arrived on time, in good condition, and appears to reasonably well put together.Unfortunately, this is the only good thing that can be said about the company. First, they conveniently omitted from the product description the fact that the software to load an image onto the FPGA via USB only supports Windows. You find this out only by reading the manual.Second, the reviews on the site are at least censored, possibly fraudulent. How do I know? I tried to post one, and magically, it never appeared.If you dig around in their forums, it turns out there is a Python script you can use on Linux to transfer an image. Turns out, this doesn't work either. The script crashes.So, now I'm stuck with a $50 paperweight. I hope that this warning prevents anyone else from being taken in by a shady company.

Purchased this board on Amazon.in. Though I had to use a command line tool (I am on Linux) to download the bit stream everything works like a charm.