[Coco] Howto for Altera DE1?

[Mark McDougall]

Steven Hirsch wrote:

> <sigh> I'm working with the Linux (Beta) version of Quartus.  Do you 
> know what the procedure would be in that environment?  I'm one of those 
> folks who avoids Windows like the plague unless it's the only option.

Before I address your question, I should have made it clear that the Control 
Panel application requires that you have configured the FPGA with the 
corresponding Control Panel firmware (not that it helps your problem Steven).

The Control Panel application communicates with the Control Panel firmware 
in the FPGA to provide "low level" functions like directly accessing 
on-board devices such as SRAM, Flash, LEDs etc. Just to make it perfectly 
clear, it has nothing what-so-ever to do with Quartus or any other Altera 
development tools. It was developed specifically for the DE1 by TerASIC.

Back to Steve's question... unfortunately I'm not aware of any linux-based 
tool that is compatible with the DE1 control panel application. :(

Having said that, I do know that the Quartus toolchain does include 
(command-line) components to program external flash devices via the FPGA - 
and I believe parallel flash is amongst the supported devices. It is used, 
for instance, in some configurations when configuring NIOS systems to boot 
from off-chip memory. And these definitely have Linux support.

However, I'm not aware of any shink-wrapped solution to program flash 
directly with a binary image. In theory it should be possible to put 
together your own project to jury-rig the above-mentioned components into 
something that will do the job. Worst-case scenario, you could put together 
a NIOS system that read a binary from SD card and programmed it into flash.

If you asked nicely enough, I might be able to find the time to munge one of 
my existing projects into something like the above. :) In the mean-time, I 
can ask around to see if anyone has something suitable.

BTW AFAIK, no-one has had any luck running the Control Panel application via 
WINE either... :(

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"