After buying a Digilent Basys2 board last year to teach myself programming FPGAs with VHDL I never really sat down for a few hours to get to know the programming environment. Partly because coming from microcontrollers where I’d always setup a Makefile to compile my code and program the boards, learning how to use a 14.5 GB piece of software was daunting. However, recently I picked up a copy of FPGAs 101 to kickstart my venture.