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Re: Carte Blanche arrives!

Steve wrote:


I hate to seem unappreciative of Steve's documentation efforts, but I
seriously doubt that any Apple 2 hobbyists are planning to buy an Altium
Designer license :-)  In my opinion, this effort would be better spent showing
off the use of WebPack.

Steve


ISE is great value (well, being free is hard to beat) Hopefully Alex
will knock up a set of ISE templates. I hope to do a few ISE designs
myself as examples and put them up. AD isnt too bad.  For $400 bux you
get the FPGA dev side and a board. The only problem is the license is
timed. But ISE is a sure fire solution that you can download now. I
dont mind either.

http://www.newark.com/altium/12-400-nb3000xn-01/nanoboard-3000xn-xilinx-spartan/dp/10R0248
That pricing is not as onerous as I thought, but what worries me more than the limited time is the statement "..license which is linked to the NanoBoard in the box..". That implies that the designer is not usable unless it sees the subject hardware on the end of the cable.
And, once again, they do not show a price for yearly renewal ("the first one's free kid, the rest you pay for.."). :-) Let's face it, unlike Xilinx these guys rely on software licensing and support as their primary revenue stream. I don't fault them a bit for it, but since I don't do hardware for a living it's not something I plan to pursue. 

Steve