Suggestions for starter projects?

[MGN]

Just bought a Basys3 to get some experience with FPGA programming.  I downloaded and installed Vivado 2022.1 and have started looking for some sample projects. I found the projects at https://learn.digilentinc.com/list?category=Digital  but think they might be a bit dated. For example if I search for Baysys3 I get no hits, but plenty of Basys2.  Can you tell me if these will generally work with Basys3 and Vivado 2022.1, or I should I be looking somewhere else for sample projects to get started?  

Thanks for your suggestions

[zygot]

Suggestions for a good sample project depends on a number of things:

What are your goals? Just wanting to see the board do something to show that it works? Want a project that you can modify and build?

What is your skill/knowledge level? Do you have experience writing and developing with VHDL or Verilog? There are two basic design flows. The HDL flow uses VHDL or Verilog as source files. The IPI flow uses a GUI to connect someone else's IP into a design. Sooner or later you will need to be competent in the HDL flow so I recommend this as a starting place for beginners.

There are example projects that are designed to use specific external interfaces like DDR, LEDs, switches, etc. that are board specific. There are example projects that can work with pretty much any board and include HDL sources. These can be modified to suit a particular board. Generally, the only external interface used is a UART.

It would be nice if board vendors provided suitable HDL demo projects for every board that they sell but this isn't always the case. FPGA vendor tools complicate this.

So, tell us a bit more about what you are looking for.

I keep thinking that I should post a general beginner's tutorial with eample projects for people with posts like yours; but frankly, while I empathize with customers, I am reticent to provide a free service to vendors who don't want to provide the support that their paying customers deserve. You could do a web search for projects for a board that the vendor doesn't support. You might get lucky. Edited July 1, 2022 by zygot

[JColvin]

Hi @MGN,

The projects you found will in general work with the Basys 3. In terms of direct compatibility of those projects, the main thing would be appropriately adjusting the constraints to work for the Basys 3.

Otherwise, there are a number of example projects (all HDL based) for the Basys 3 available on it's Resource Center: https://digilent.com/reference/programmable-logic/basys-3/start. But like zygot mentioned, I do not know if these are the types of projects you are looking for.

Thanks,
JColvin