Cyclone V dev. and USB Blaster II

Hi,

One piece of information that I didn't see in your posts: what OS are you running on your host machine?

We run USB Blaster II on Windows XP, connected to the target board onto which I want to download.

My experience has been the following using the Chinese-made USB Blaster II devices on XP, which I provide simply as a data point. Note that this experience has also been observed on a Windows 7 laptop.

(1) when you connect your Blaster to a USB port, it should always be the same port (in my case, on a laptop), otherwise XP has to configure a new driver instance for that port and I have to install the Blaster again using Plug and Play;

(2) periodically, I can be ready to download model from Quartus II Programmer, and the download fails because the device suddenly is "not found", as in Quartus tells you that you haven't selected a device, even though it's still plugged in;

(3) I've had several USB Blasters stop working, so we make sure we have several ones on hand, and we mark the ones that don't seem to work. If the device stops working, it could be a problem with board voltage levels that drive some of the signals back onto the Blaster.

Having a logic analyzer to check signal timing and levels on this set of pins from the Blaster is something we have also used from time to time.

In our case, we've got a custom board, and we were talking to early board revs using PS mode, with a Cyc III device.

Hope this helps.

cheers,

jim