Nexys Video still a good starting point?

[300cpilot]

I purchased a Nexys Video board a few years ago, for my son, for a college course. I ran across it a few weeks ago and I am thinking about dusting it off.

Anyway I would like to begin my journey with FPGA's and want to see if this is a good starting point for a FPFG noob? Or if there is a better starting point? Youtube is pretty poor for FPGA topic. Most are quit old. I do have 20 years experience as a network engineer and a lot of linux. :) 

Please let me know your thoughts. Thank you for your time.

[zygot]

There's no reason not to start learning FPGA development with a Nexys Video board, if you have one lying around. It has the largest Artix device there is and a lot of useful external functionality; decent DDR3, Ethernet PHY, DPTI USB 2.0, an FMC connector, etc.

This depends on what your expectations are for your self-taught FPGA journey will encompass. If you'd rather do C programming and ease into actual logic design later, a cheap ZYNQ might be what you want. This path is more comfortable for people with a strong software background. Of course there's a soft-processor approach like MicroBaze or RISC-V. An RPI4 has a lot more horsepower than even a UltraScale ZYNQ board that's affordable , and you can manipulate IO pins to control external hardware; so you'd have to ask why even bother with struggling with the complicated Vitis/Vivado tool flow. For ZYNQ, some functionality requires running a Linux disto on your hardware and that involves even more complicated tools that must be run on a Linux host.

Hopefully, you really want to learn logic design and how to do it using an HDL like VHDL, Verilog or System Verilog. To get started with this, you don't even need hardware. Just learn your HDL and how to write testbench code and simulate your designs. Be aware that using an HDL for logic synthesis might be a difficult change of mindset for someone comfortable with C or Python development. On the surface VHDL or Verilog statements and constricts appear to be very similar to ADA or C. Logic design entails quite different conceptual underpinnings. But this is programmable logic design.

There are a number of projects designed for the Nexys Video posted in Digilent forums that don't use a soft-processor or extensive Vivado IP and use most if not all of the Nexys Video interfaces. Edited January 8 by zygot