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Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

BeMicro and Programming Under Linux

Hello, I have just received a BeMicro and have completed the tutorial up to the point where I need to download the SOF file. Unfortunately, I cannot get Quartus II v 9.1sp2 Programmer to r...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

I spent some time this weekend installing the driver from the arrowce site mentioned by Harald, and testing the BeMicro. The folks at Arrow were kind enough to send me the file by e-mail earlier on Friday (Thanks!).

With some additional work, was able to complete the BeMicro LED exercise. Thus, the driver appears to work fine, both for programming, and for the jtag-uart control, but only using the 32 bit Linux version of everything. This is a very good development!

I installed the libjtag_hw_arrow.so driver in the quartus/linux/ directory, enabled selinux text-relocation, set rw permissions for the USB device and installed the FTDI library libftd2xx version 0.4.16 from: http://www.ftdichip.com/drivers/d2xx.htm

The Quartus programmer magically recognized the presence of the libjtag_hw_arrow.so library, I don't know how it did that, unless it simply searches for any library file with a "libjtag_hw" prefix, then tries to use it. Quite clever.

However, I have a couple questions remaining:

1) The BeMicro example exercise claims that the jtag-uart can be accessed through a regular serial port, and thus a program such as "hyperterminal" under windows could access it. I could not find an equivalent device under Linux to access the jtag-uart through any of the standard serial port devices under /dev. Am I missing something, or is the nios2-ide console the only access to the jtag-uart port under Linux?

2) The NIOS2-IDE/Eclipse environment is quite different under Linux than what appears to be under the windows environment. With some effort and frustration, I was able to figure out most of where everything needed to be configured, however, I could not find where to specify the "interrupt vector" and "interrupt size" in the Linux version under the hardware specification. Any hints about this?

3) Since the README file states that the i586 driver was developed with a 64 bit machine, it seems that a 64 bit version should be trivial to produce? Any chance of making the source code available?

Thank you again for your help.

Dave Rector

*:^)