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I spent most of Sunday cleaning up after the previous day's holiday open house. Successful hosts know that party gifts take many forms. These range from a plate of delicious homemade cookies prepared in advance to more spontaneous gifts -- a cashmere coat or gently used handbag laden with prescription drugs, valuable photo identification, and other holiday treats.

When the wreckage was cleared away, I found my favorite party gift was a small FPGA board tucked away in the bottom of a hall closet. It came with a delicious lack of documentation or provenance. It was still in its festive red sparkfun holiday gift box.

The board itself is decked out for the season with festive red soldermask. I remember when all the cool kids used to do that. The board is a 'Papillo One' from www.GadgetFactory.net. It must be the cutest FPGA board I have ever seen.

Papillo One (with Betty O'Shannon for scale)
Photo credit: Your correspondent

Some hobbyists like evaluation boards. I'm not one of them. Where others see discount eval boards as a natural extension of the free sample heroin/semiconductor mentality, I see vendor condescension and lock-in. I think that one of the biggest differences between the original Arduino and an eval board with the same microprocessor (like Atmel's STK500) is that the Arduino is marketed to you as a product that makes sense in its own right. No pesky questions about what the size of your target market is and which industry you work in and the number of employees in your basement workshop.

I actually like the Arduino IDE. For me, though, it's enough to distribute the boards without a crippled evaluation version of a larger and more full featured crippled C compiler.

Just as the Arduino is really not very different from a number of small AVR boards, the Papillo One
is not very different from some other small boards for the Xilinx Spartan 3e. I have only spent a few minutes with the board so far. It's 'killer app' appears to be the included AVR-alike from softcores and supporting patches to let the board be used with the Arduino IDE.

For me, the hardware differences between boards makes less difference than the concept of the board. This board is for fooling around with, not for selling the Spartan 3E. I think that's a good thing.

A full review will come as soon as I can get this to replace one of the Arduinos driving my Christmas lights.