the nano i was looking at does have "two CDs with the software necessary to 'compile' and 'upload' code to the board. " but not sure if the EP4CE22F17C6N is usable
The DE0-Nano is great to get started learning about fpga's, but it won't make you any useful coin. 5MHash/sec is about right, it will go faster but not without risk of overheating, and certainly no more than about 25MHash/sec (using Makomk's modified power supply). To put that in context 5MHash/sec will currently earn approx 0.0003 bitcoin per day (and getting less by roughly 20% every 2 weeks as the difficulty increases).
If you do decide to get a DE0-Nano, start with the DE2_70_Unoptimized_Pipelined project. You'll need to increase CONFIG_LOG_LOOP2 to 4 to get it to compile (that's one eighth of a core, I think). I cheated and edited the fpgaminer.qsf file directly to configure it for the EP4CE22, but its probably safer to create a new project from scratch and add in the source files.
Mark
Heh, thats about $1 a month (at the ~$100/coin mark) so that thing is not going to break even this life time i thinks
So, i might have to go hunt out some 2nd hand Spartan6 with 150K gates (or similar)
So the question is, will any 150K gate fpga work with the full miner? or is there something I'm missing (EG:
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,790&Prod=BASYS2 with 250K gates, slap on the full miner, and bam, 1hash a clock? )