FPGAuary Giveaway is a Wrap!

by Crowd Supply

The FPGAuary Giveaway was a huge success. We received over 2,000 signups from all over the world and gave away twenty Digilent Basys 3 trainer boards for the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, along with a self-guided WTFPGA workbook by Joe Fitz of SecuringHardware.com. Prize boxes went out to winners in the US, India, Germany, Chile, Hong Kong, and Mexico, to name just a few! Winners were randomly chosen by Crowd Supply from all unique subscribers to this page as of February 28, 2021. In the end, there were over 2,000 entries.

This was followed up by two livestreamed FPGA workshops led by Adam Taylor of Adiuvo Engineering and Training. There was so much interest that we made these workshops open to anyone — over 350 attendees participated in the live version. Now, we’re sharing archived versions for future use. If you’re curious about FPGAs, there’s never been a better time to get started!

Twenty lucky winners received:

One Basys 3 Artix-7 FPGA Trainer Board ($149 MSRP)
WTFPGA workbook for self-guided practice
Access to livestreamed professional training
Limited-edition bonus gifts

Basys 3 Trainer Board

Digilent’s Basys 3 trainer board is an entry-level FPGA development board with the following features:

Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA (XC7A35T-1CPG236C)
- 33,280 logic cells in 5200 slices (each slice contains four 6-input LUTs and 8 flip-flops)
- 1,800 Kbits of fast block RAM
- Five clock management tiles, each with a phase-locked loop (PLL)
- 90 DSP slices
- Internal clock speeds exceeding 450 MHz
- On-chip analog-to-digital converter (XADC)
Programming
- Designed exclusively for the Vivado Design Suite
- Free WebPACK™ download for standard use
- Digilent USB-JTAG port
- Serial flash
Connectivity
- USB A HID Host for mice, keyboards, and memory sticks
- USB micro-B
- Four 12-pin Pmod ports
- 12-bit VGA output
- USB-UART bridge
User Interfaces
- 16 x user switch
- 16 x user LED
- 5 x user pushbutton
- 1 x four-digit seven-segment display
Pmod Expandability
- 3 x standard 12-pin Pmod port
- 1 x dual purpose XADC signal / standard Pmod port

WTFPGA Workbook

This battle-tested, self-guided, introductory FPGA workbook by Joe Fitz of SecuringHardware.com is designed to take about two hours to complete. It includes a series of exercises that build a basic understanding of FPGAs, how they work, and how to program them in Verilog. You will practice learning how to blink LEDs, display salutations, use switches and buttons as input, do some type conversion, and even implement a simple calculator.

A previous version of the WTFPGA workshop ran with over sixty participants during Crowd Supply’s inaugural Teardown hardware conference in 2018.

Livestreamed FPGA Workshop with Adam Taylor

After your self-guided WTFPGA workshop, dive even further down the FPGA rabbit hole with professional FPGA instructor Adam Taylor! Adam is the founder of Adiuvo Engineering and Training and the visiting Professor of Embedded Systems at the University of Lincoln. Adam has been working with Xilinx and Arm-based FPGA and embedded processors for the last seven years and most recently he has been developing with the Cortex-M1 and Cortex-M3 processors via DesignStart FPGA.

You can follow along with the archived workshops below with a Digilent Basys 3 board, available to order through Crowd Supply.