Any idea of what the hashing rate will be under scrypt? Trying to figure out if i should just give it back or if there's any point to me (a non-programmer) having one of these?
Its going to be pathetic, even if he gets it to work at all! You need memory (lots of it) for scrypt, and there is no way of attaching any to that little usb board, so it will rely on the host over the usb connection. Its going to be slower than CPU mining.
It will do bitcoin mining though (at about 5MHash/sec using the standard fpgaminer code), so it will earn you a couple of USD cents a day, less the electricity cost for running your host computer, so that's a money sink by my reckoning, even if you hosted it off something low-powered like a raspberry pi (which will need some custom software coded for the usb interface as the xilinx toolset certainly won't run on it).
My advice, send it back and get a proper miner (not one of those ASIC pre-order scams though, you'll never get your money back by the time you eventually take delivery).
Just my 2c
BTCYep. All 100% correct and the speeds are going to be pretty lame indeed. You will get much better hashing speeds with good multi core CPU's and even a low-to-mid range (much cheaper) ATI 5xxx card for the price.
I'm mostly doing this for the fun of it, as I already have this board and it makes of an interesting add-on project for a PC that's hashing to the max. with it's CPU's and GPU's already. I'm looking to do something with all that free system RAM.
Knowing what might be possible and having experience with these FPGA's and developing code for scrypt mining will be applicable to better / faster FPGA boards in the future. Hopefully that explains why I'm even bothering with this.