I was looking to have a play with FPGA's or CPLD's (I'm leaning to FPGA's - they seem to be more flexible)

Altera have a nice development board for $150 (http://www.buyaltera.com/scripts/p...4-1736-ND) looks like a bit of fun to play with, any advice on how to get started?

I don't want to do anything flash. I was thinking along the lines of the following

Transmitter Side
Message from uController
CRC Addition
Hamming Code Addition
Interleaving
Manchester Coding
Modulation
Output to IR


Receiver Side
Demodulation - Optional
Manchester Decoding
Deinterleaving
DeHamming / Forward Error Correction
CRC Error Detection
Message to uController


After doing this lot and getting it working I can fiddle with the functions in the middle to make them more resilient (Reed Solomon instead of hamming)


I have most (90%) of this operational in my LPC at the moment, so I know that it doesn't take too much horsepower, and from what I have read this is exactly what FPGA's are good at, just getting started is the hard part. Mind you having the application always helps, nothing like being forced to do it.

Perhaps this is better in new thread? feel free to move it to the Chat board or wherever it more appropriate.

Back to the original thread
I have decided to put in a 3pin demodulator jobber and be done with it.

Regards

Marshall