Cyclone III Starter Kit - USB Communication

Since the Control Panel application can communicate with the board contents through the default factory design loaded into the FPGA, it must be possible to use this same trick for own designs. For that, a couple of things would be needed.

- From within the custom FPGA design, how to connect to the FDTI USB chip? The pins do not seem to be documented although I suspect the JTAG pins are used for this, which are supposed to be configured as regular IO pins. The C3SK documentation has no reference material on this.

- From the PC side, how would one communicate with the USB Blaster Driver? Of the little I discovered so far, the driver runs as a Service on the host computer which needs to be connected to through the TCP/IP protocol. Is there any SDK or reference material available to use the USB Blaster for serial communication?

If anyone could help me with this would be a god-send. It would be great to write my own PC side software to communicate with specific designs I'm working on. It must be possible as proven by the Control Panel. Now we just need this documented ;)