Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorSince you comment you are a newbie, I'll provide some feedback on your design proposal and offer an alternative.
Your project/proposal: What is the task? Are you responsible for the FPGA communications, or is that just a means-to-an-end? Is the main task related to the polynomial coefficients and whatever those coefficients are controlling? As far as the communications aspect goes, your solution would work fine, however, it may involve more work than is really necessary. Here's what you would do: 1. Connect the two boards together. a) The serial board looks like some sort of FTDI breakout board with USB and a header. It should be receiving power from the USB port, so there should be *no* reason for you to connect power pins from that board to the DE0-nano. b) Check that your RS232 board output is 3.3V logic - not 5V logic (the DE0-nano cannot handle 5V signals). c) Connect the TX and RX pins from your serial board to two GPIO pins on your DE0-nano, and connect a ground pin between the two boards (so that they both agree on voltages). 2. Create an FPGA system containing a NIOS II processor, a UART, and your custom logic and connect that UART to the GPIO pins. 3. Write NIOS II software to receive data over the serial port, and write the coefficients into your custom logic. 4. Write the host software to send data to the NIOS II. While all this is pretty straightforward, since you are new to this, it might take you a while to get to grips with all the details. An alternative implementation is to implement the communications using the USB-Blaster connection that already exists between your board and your PC. Read through this tutorial http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/using_the_usb-blaster_as_an_sopc/qsys_avalon-mm_master_tutorial The tutorial contains all the code you need for communications with a Qsys or SOPC System. Continue to ask questions and the readers of this forum will provide feedback. Cheers, Dave
