Ready, set, go!

Today I finally got in the mail the equipment I am going to be using for my little beginner's projects and I am so excited!!! My school renewed some of the equipment in the digital lab and sold the old FPGA boards for a very tempting price and I couldn't resist. Here's what I got:

I had to get a power adapter for the board and a parallel port for my computer but I can start downloading my little baby steps now. I also got a little Teensy++ USB development board. That one I got because I was originally intending to use it for a project that a friend from business school asked me to joint but when the team decided to go on a different direction I was already very interested in learning how to use it so I bought it for myself. Here's a picture that shows how tiny and cool (at least for me) this thing is:

And finally, as I was browsing the web looking for projects I stumbled upon a little infrared remote and receiver and bought them as well. Yeah, I wish I were not a poor student, then I could buy more stuff I don't know how to use (yet). And yes, I also took a picture of that:

In the end, I still don't know what I am going to do with all this but in the meantime I will lean how to program Teensy, start reviewing my old Lab files to get my VHDL skills back and will be posting my progress regularly. Maybe I can come up with a larger project along the way. For now, it's time to go to bed.