Yeah, the SoC boards a nice. So much of what you want to do on an FPGA these days requires the use of a processor anyhow, you might as well have an actual hard

Yeah, the SoC boards a nice. So much of what you want to do on an FPGA these days requires the use of a processor anyhow, you might as well have an actual hard block instead of a NIOSII or whatever. We use DE1's at my company as the FPGA analog (pun not intended) of a Arduino Uno, for when we want to do a quick test of some part of a design in hardware, or want to stick the device into something but don't want to tie up a high end unit for something trivial. Be aware that the DE1 has pretty limited resources for somethings. For exmaple, the on-chip memory can get tapped out pretty quickly when doing embedded applications, and it has less I/O and less RAM available off-chip. Also note that the DE1-SoC actually uses a Cyclone V device, whereas the original DE-1 uses a Cyclone II, a nearly discontinued chip that is a big step down.