Cheap FPGA PCIe Development | Hackaday [Video]

Typically, if you want to build an FPGA project inside a PC, you’d need a fairly expensive development board that plugs into the bus. However, [CircuitValley] found some IBM RS-485 boards that are little more than a PCIe board with an Intel FPGA onboard. These are widely avaiable on the surplus market for around $20 shipped. He’s been documenting how to use them.

The FPGA onboard is a Cyclone IV with about 21,000 logic elements and a little over 750 kbits of memory. The board itself has configuration memory, power management, and a few connectors. The JTAG header is unpopulated, but the footprint is there. You simply need to supply a surface-mount pin header and an external JTAG probe, and you can program. Even if you aren’t interested in using an FPGA board, the reverse engineer steps are fun to watch.

The situation reminds us a little of the RTL-SDR — when a device uses …