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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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11 years ago

Alternative to DE1 control panel?

As a lot of users here I have problems with the DE1 control panel. It exits with the error message "Please make sure Quartus is installed". The DE1 manual states that it has to be Quartus 12.0 or newer. I have 13.0sp1 on a 64Bit Windows 7. Sysinternals process monitor tells me that it can find the quartus bin directory and it loads the jtag_client.dll.

Before looking any further is there any other way to write the (external?) 4mb flash and/or the SRAM (quartus_pgm or with Quartus)?

Any examples would be highly appreciated.

Thanks,

Winni

4 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    11 years ago

    You can use the Quartus programmer to write the external flash. IIRC there is an example in the DE1 board manual. If you either have a NIOS with debug enabled, or a jtag master bridge in your system you can use system console to write SRAM if you have a connection defined. You can search for system console examples to find more details.

    In some cases the DE1 control panel is failing because it doesn't have the version of the visual studio runtime library that it is looking for installed. No guarantee that is what's causing your problem...
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    11 years ago

    Would you mind giving me an example for writing an .bin or .hex file to the external flash (and which bit file to load)? I didn't found anything in the manual so far or I don't understand it ;)

    The control panel seems to find the the right runtime libraries. At least it looks like in the process monitor that it opens the right msvc* dlls.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    11 years ago

    The only examples I've seen of programming a parallel flash uses a NIOS 2 processor on the FPGA that talks to the flash programmer (not quartus programmer as I said above). On youtube there is a "my first nios ii" tutorial that does this in the 2nd half of part 2. It's for a DE2 board, so you might need to change the timing settings based on the flash chip on the DE1 if it is different than the DE2. It is an older tutorial based on sopc builder, not QSYS. Still you might be able to figure out how to set up a QSYS nios system on the DE1 using that tutorial as guidance.

    I followed that tutorial a few years ago with sopc builder on my DE2 board and it worked.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    11 years ago

    Looks like that the old 1.0 version of the control panel from CD v08 works fine.