Cyclone IV FPGA Development Board

Intro

My favourite thing about ebay is that it has a wide variety of development boards which provide great functionality at prices far lower than branded products.  Looking for an FPGA board I was very excited when I saw this one.

It has a great specification:

FPGA core board: Power input DC5V FPGA:EP4CE10F17C8N SDRAM:256M SPI FLASH: 64M 50 MHz CLK input  Bottom board: PC PS/2 port VGA port ,can display picture or video, 16 bit 65536 colours SD card LCD12864/1602 ,can display number or English character LCD TFT ,can display number or English character, or video LED 7seg display 1x8, can display number LED 1X8 COM port 8X8 LED dot matrix 3X3 key input pad 1X4 key input switch 1X8 input ADCTLC549, you can analogue signal acquisition DAC7512, digital signal to analogue signal IR input DS18B20 temperature sensor

So three days later we have lots of inputs and outputs to play with.
In fact the FPGA board is detachable so one could theoretically use all the board IOs for other purposes.

I experienced problems initially as my usb blaster programmer turned out to be a clone and I had to install old WIN7 unsigned drivers to make it work.  Once I was able to load software the board was great.  The vendor provided Quartus programs to test the main features and it was a pleasure to load and run them so that I could be sure my subsequent efforts utilised working hardware.  Update: Life became much easier when I bought a real usb blaster (£16 instead of £6), which works perfectly.