I like the cpld breakout boards showing up from time to time, but those are great to be incorporated in some project (if you do not like soldering big chips yourself) and not really that cool for learning stuff. If you need a small dev kit for cpld I can highly recommend CoolRunner-II CPLD Starter Kit (http://http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/SK-CRII-L-G.htm). I have this small board for a while and it's more then you need to learn to use cpld's and it's fairly cheap ($60)... it's of course proprietary, the atmel on board (that can be used to communicate with chips on board and to program cpld and to talk with your host computer via usb) has some proprietary firmware etc etc ... but board is interesting, besides everything is broken out there's a place for external oscillator, there's internal oscillator on board with switch (10khz, 100khz, 1mhz) 4x7seg display, 2 switches, 2 buttons, 4 leds, LTC2494 (http://http://www.linear.com/product/LTC2494), LT3028 (http://http://www.linear.com/product/LT3028) so you can follow voltage levels, current draw, temperature etc etc .. I highly recommend it
Actually 59$
well it depends... I paid for it much more on some italian online shop, attm they don't sell it and on xilinx site they say 59$ and link to avnet asking 117$ for the same board .. so the actual price really depends on where you purchase it from ..
Yeah I agree the same, I have paid 4.30USD for MSP430 launchpad, then FedEx charged me 483RS(~10USD) extra for customs, whereas customs in my country is actually 15% of invoice value.
Just as I said, the breakouts are great to incorporate in your design or push to a breadboard, a dev kit is bit easier - you plug it in to a usb and play with it ... no additional parts required :)