Hi, I'm planning on ordering an altera DE2-70 board from terasic and i was wondering if anyone could tell me if their general impression of the board. My university uses the DE2 for all of its engineering department and it seems like a solid dev board to me. But i want to make sure there aren't any weird bugs or anything with the DE2-70. Its a pretty new board so i just want to make sure everything works fine on it

I think it's the best board developed so far for university use. I've been using this to teach a lot of students and it's easy to use.

alright, thanks alot for your opinion.. i've got my de2-70 board a day ago :)... now if only i could figure out how make the de2-70 control panel work

Hi BYS2, I'm also interested in the new DE2-70. Please let us know your experience with it. I downloaded the CD. The DE2-70 has some nice hardware enhancements, but the samples really stink. These DE boards are supposed to be educational. Samples should be fully commented. The samples provided though, are so poorly commented and (un)documented that you come to think it is on purpose. Let alone that many modules are encrypted ... This was already true for the older DE boards. Now on the DE2-70 is, IMHO, worse. Many samples have been migrated from HDL to Nios. This make them almost useless as samples purposes. On the other hand, it is difficult to complain too much. The hardware you get at this low price is unbeatable.

I take it that students outside of Academia cannot benefit from the $270 rebate?

tommythorn: if you've been to a unversity/college before then you might still be able to, i don't think they're too strict about it.. vjAlter: my reivew of the DE2-70 board well, after 2 weeks of playing around with my board, i think im ready to give you some first impressions of it. I'm not a pro or anything with using this board, so i've actually not used many of the features yet (NIOS, tv decoder, etc..). but here goes: There seemed to be an issue with the control panel that was included as part of the demo. Sometimes, the initialization files would fail to download. This problem doesn't always happen and seems to have corrected iteself lately. Also, with my board, if you touch the underneath of the board in certain areas, the DE2-70 board would reset itself. This was a pretty annoying problem since it happened quite a few times when i was moving around my board to connect it to various peripherals. I emailed terasic support about these 2 problems and they indicated that the first problem may be due to the USB blaster being 'unstable', no idea what that really means, but they did not really elaborate. The second problem they said that it might be due to the fact that some components are operating "at the limits of their tolerance" so the electrical properties of the human body might cause it to reset itself... a bit unsettling, and i hope these problems are not widespread.. the board seems to be working fine apart from those problems, all their demos and the other quartus projects i have seem to be working fine when i run them... although, since most of my projects were done for the DE2 board, it was a bit of a pain to migrate them to the DE2-70 board (pin assignments since defautl pin names are different).. they should have included a utility to do auto-pin reassignments to port DE2 projects to the DE2-70 board... Also, the samples and demos they give you are not very well-commented.. and many of their samples are now implemented using Nios instead of HDL. However, at the price fo 330 usd, the hardware you get is fantastic.. lots of IO ports, good FPGA, very solid set of components... only glitch is the area under where it says "power supplies by linear technology" which if you touch, it will spontaneously reset your board... so overall, even with all the little glitches that i mentioned above, i still think this is a really good board and i don't regret my purchase..

Terasic DE2-70 Board | Altera Community

26 Replies

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
17 years ago
Update (since I got a question on this): The updated control panel (version 1.1.0) from Terasic works great with Quartus 8.1 and NIOS2 for Quartus 8.1. Note, it doesn't work without the NIOS2 package being installed.
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
15 years ago
Hi,

I am trying the LCD example which is provided in the Cd-Rom. when I click on the download code, after 70% of downlaod it gives me the follwoing error

download NIOS2 file(DE2_70_Control_panel_ssram.elf) fail!

Kindly suggest what to do.

Thanks,
Mumble.
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
8 years ago
Hi all!
This is my first time dealing with any FPGA, so bear with me here
I am using a DE2-70 for a project, I have a Dell Inspiron Laptop running windows 10
I am trying to communicate with the board with the control panel, with no success- I keep getting the "failure to download code/failure to connect with FPGA" message
Can anyone suggest a full order of operations, from 0% to 100%, for how to use the control panel. Starting from which version of Quartus II to download, which files to download, which order to install them in, etc.

Thanks!

PS. I read that when I plug in the board, I will get a pop up asking me to install a driver for the USB blaster. I did not get such a pop up, so please include instructions for that as well
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
8 years ago
Have you downloaded all the documentation / tools / software for the board from Terasic? See: http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?language=english&categoryno=183&no=226

This is an older board design using the Cyclone II device, and I think you will be limited to QuartusII v13.0sp1 as the latest version that supports that device family.

However, I also believe v13.0sp1 requires Windows 7 32b/64b or earlier; Windows 8/10 are not officially supported. So you might need to get an older computer, or a newer FPGA board.
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
8 years ago
Hi ak6dn!
First off, thanks for your quick reply
I did download all the programs and software I could find from that website, and I was using the Quartus II v13.0sp1, and it still did not work. I even sent an email to Terasic support. I'll paste their reply here
"Thank you for your using the DE2-70 kit.
The demos created for the DE2-70 should be very old version, maybe Quartus II v7.1. So please use the Quartus v9.1 or earlier version to run the demos of the De2-70 kit if possible.
The Quartus software is availble to download from Altera online: https://www.altera.com/downloads/download-center.html. Please download the version you needed.
The CD-ROM resource is online: http://mail.terasic.com.cn/~wyzhou/de2_70_system_cd_v.1.4.0.rar , please download it and use as a reference. Thank you.

Free to contact us if you have any other inquiry.
Best Regards"

Also, a very quick reply.

So I was using a version of Quartus II that is supposed to work with Cyclone II devices, but still no go.

I then uninstalled that version and installed Quartus II 7.2 sp3 because that is the version that came with the board while it was being sold. Also no go. But I also didn't install the NIOS II EDS. I'll try that now

I looked at this thread and saw some other small fixes (like no spaces). I'll try them and see if they work and will update.

But any other tips with how to run this would be very appreciated.

I would not want to run this on an older computer or on a VM unless I had exhausted ALL the other options

Thanks again!
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
8 years ago
Hello again
Turns out I have a much more basic problem- The Altera USB blaster is not installed (I am using windows 10). I am starting a different thread for this. Thanks for your help!

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Terasic DE2-70 Board

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