Terasic DE2-70 Board

I finaly got my ne today, in one word Great Board.

it has everything you need, i also baught the camera and lcd module, works both great.

consurning the sample applications, there are good, but they are all coded in verilog(i'm a vhdl guy), i see as an oportunity to get a grip on verilog.

greets Mirimon

Hey,

I have a problem with the control panel of the Altera DE2-70 Cyclone II Board.

I use the Quartus II Web edition and have installed the license.

but every time I start the control panel the Error "Fail to connect FPGA Board - Please Click the 'Download Code' button to download control code for your board" appears but if I click on this button a second error appear with "Please make sure Quartus is installed".

But it is installed and I can run it so what is wrong?

have anyone an idea?thanks

I'm a beginner at this, but I want to learn it now, I hope you can help me.

I'm a student from germany so its possible that my english is not the best. ;)

thanks

I suspect your problem is related to the USB driver for the onboard USB blaster. (What OS are you running?)

Try launching Quartus II and open the programmer (Tools/Programmer). Click on Hardware Setup. If you don't see the USB blaster under the "Available hardware items:" then either your board is incorrectly connected to the PC or the driver is missing/not installed properly. If you connect power to the DE2-70, turn it on, and then connect the USB cable, Windows will either ask report it found the USB Blaster or ask about installing the drivers.

If this all checks out perfectly, then we'll have to dig deeper.

Tommy

sudoku,

i had a simlar issue with the control panel, it seems to have gone away now though..

A few notes though, the first error "Fail to connect FPGA Board - Please Click the 'Download Code' button to download control code for your board" is fine.. this is not a glitch... its just telling you that the control panel isn't connected to the board yet..

also, after you click the 'download code', don't do anything on your computer while its downloading (i.e. don't switch window to browse the net)... this might seem irrelevant, but trust me, it solved my problem... this is gonna be kinda annoying though if you test out the music playback feature from the control panel since it takes it about 5 minutes to transfer a full .wav file from the control panel to the DE2-70.. and even clicking away from the window for a few seconds can make the transfer fail for some reason..

good news is that this only happens when you're doing stuff with the control panel and their image/video utility.. when transfering stuff from Quartus, i can play a game while waiting for the stuff to transfer no problems..

tommy's advice is good as well, make sure your Quartus works and the usb blaster driver is installed, you might want to make a very simple file in Quartus and try to transfer it to your DE2-70 board (2 inputs from the swtiches through an AND gate and output the result on a LED is a very simple circuit that you can use to test)..

Hey Tommy,

I use Windows XP with the service Pack 2 and the blaster-driver is already installed and its also listed in Quartus.

@BYS2:

If I click the 'Download Code' Button the error appers in a second, so I have no time to click anywhere else.

When I klick on the 'Connect' Button, the "LOAD"-LED indicated a bit an the first Error appears again.

I have also 2 different "Control Panels", on the CD which where send with the board is another "Control Panel", there I can only open the USB-Blaster and then set some checkboxes for example for an LED, but If I click on the "Set"-Button, only the "GOOD"-LED on the board indicated but nothing happens.

So there must be an connection between the board and my PC.

I will try to transfer the file to my board which BYS2 means.

thanks.

--EDIT:

So...I try to test my programm but it doesn't works...I don't know if its my fault or something else.

Here's my programm:

ENTITY test1 IS

GENERIC (delay : time := 10 ns);

PORT (PIN_AA23, PIN_AB26 : IN bit;

PIN_AJ6 : OUT bit);

END test1;

ARCHITECTURE func OF test1 IS

BEGIN

PROCESS (PIN_AA23, PIN_AB26)

BEGIN

PIN_AJ6 <= PIN_AA23 and PIN_AB26 AFTER delay;

END PROCESS;

END func;

I choose the Cylone II family with EP2C70F896C6 with is written on the chip an the board (but there is also an "N" at last but this is not listet in quartus)

With the "Pin Planner"

I choose the 2 pins for the 2 switches and the one for the LED and assign it to my Inputs and my Output.

Then I click on the Compilation button and on the "Analysis and Synthese"-Button and both are successful, but if I change the position of the switches...nothing happens.

Have I forgot something? or whats wrong?

I also set the "RUN/PROG"-Switch on "PROG while the syntesis and to test it I switch it back to "RUN".

and theres one warning:

Warning: Found 1 output pins without output pin load capacitance assignment

Info: Pin "PIN_AJ6" has no specified output pin load capacitance -- assuming default load capacitance of 0 pF for timing analysis

But I set this PIN.

and also another Info:

Info: Device migration not selected. If you intend to use device migration later, you may need to change the pin assignments as they may be incompatible with other devices

what does this mean?have I choose the wrong device?

I know that are basics but I hope you understand an can help me a little bit to come on the right way! ;)

thanks a lot

EDIT:

OK...now it works...AND-Gatter...I forgot to implement it...hehe...yes I#m a real beginner...but the control panel didn't work anyway...

thanks

Hi Soduko,

sorry I missed your question. Re. the control panel, it is very particular about the installation. It requires you to have both a Quartus II and a Nios II Embedded Design Suite installed - and they have to be matching versions and you're probably better off only have one version installed.

Also, be sure to copy the DE2_70_control_panel to a directory, such that the path has no spaces (Quartus II/Nios II EDS apparently has bugs when dealing the path names).

Finally, it didn't work out of the box for me with Quartus II 8.0 sp1, but there is a workaround: launch the Nios II 8.0 Command Shell and launch the control panel from that shell. Eg. I had copied the DE2_70_control_panel to C:\altera, and thus just had to execute

cd ../../../DE2_70_control_panel/SW

./DE2_70_Control_Panel.exe

Good luck,

Tommy

--- Quote Start ---

Finally, it didn't work out of the box for me with Quartus II 8.0 sp1,

--- Quote End ---

I think download won't work in any of the DE2-70 NIOS samples when using Quartus 8. The scripts set some environment variables specific for previous Quartus versions, not for version 8.

In the case of the control panel you must modify the "NiosDownloadBatch.bat" file.

--- Quote Start ---

I think download won't work in any of the DE2-70 NIOS samples when using Quartus 8. The scripts set some environment variables specific for previous Quartus versions, not for version 8.

In the case of the control panel you must modify the "NiosDownloadBatch.bat" file.

--- Quote End ---

Right. Or you could simply do what I suggested, launch it from the Nios II shell. Likely to be much simpler than figuring out which environment variables to fix.

I actually started down that road first, but AFAICT, one of the problems is that the script assumes all of the EDS to be in the PATH (eg. nios2-download). Simply adding the bin directory wasn't enough at which point I figured it wasn't worth my time.