1. I recommend that a newbie get a DE0 nano board. It's much cheaper than DE1/DE2 and has fun sensors like an accelerometer on it which can lead to pretty cool applications. I designed a quadcopter control system entirely on the DE0, using a NIOS II based Qsys system. The academic price is only $59: https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=593
2. Fun fact: the cover of the Fundamentals of Digital Logic book has Chess on it because the author, Zvonko Vranesic, is not only an father in the FPGA/CAD industry, he is also an International Chess master. Also, he's quite good at ping pong for being 76 :(
Depends what you're doing -- DE0 Nano is nice for integrating into larger projects, but if you want to say implement a little CPU and peripherals, something like the plain 'ol DE0 is only slightly more expensive and has a bunch of buttons/switches/LEDs/7-seg-displays for just-getting-started projects as well as handy IO interfaces like VGA, PS2 mouse/keyboard, etc.
> I designed a quadcopter control system entirely on the DE0, using a NIOS II based Qsys system.
Any room left on silicon for things like computer vision (well, simple stuff, like recognizing a red ball), or is the whole thing pretty much dedicated to flying the quad?
2. Fun fact: the cover of the Fundamentals of Digital Logic book has Chess on it because the author, Zvonko Vranesic, is not only an father in the FPGA/CAD industry, he is also an International Chess master. Also, he's quite good at ping pong for being 76 :(