Terasic DE2-70 Board

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.

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..

Thanks for your review. It prompted me to get one as well.

My quick notes after a less than a week:

• Shipping is fast: I ordered an a Sunday and got it Tuesday morning (Taiwan -> Ca)

• Packaging and documentation is the best I seen so far from a FPGA dev kit (I have many)

• An overall care for details (rubber feet, acrylic protection cover, test wires, etc.)

• There are lots of small positive surprises. Example:

• The FPGA is the fastest speed grade

• The PS/2 supports Y-splitters so both a keyboard and mouse can be attached

• It shipped with the most important datasheets

Minor issues:

• The lab exercises haven't been updated for the EP2C70 edition and may confuse beginnings

• The supplied pin assignment .csv didn't work for me, but cloning one of the demos worked fine

• Only the 1-bit SDcard interface is supported.

A truly spectacular board.

--- Quote Start ---

Thanks for your review. It prompted me to get one as well.

My quick notes after a less than a week:

• Shipping is fast: I ordered an a Sunday and got it Tuesday morning (Taiwan -> Ca)

• Packaging and documentation is the best I seen so far from a FPGA dev kit (I have many)

• An overall care for details (rubber feet, acrylic protection cover, test wires, etc.)

• There are lots of small positive surprises. Example:

• The FPGA is the fastest speed grade

• The PS/2 supports Y-splitters so both a keyboard and mouse can be attached

• It shipped with the most important datasheets

Minor issues:

• The lab exercises haven't been updated for the EP2C70 edition and may confuse beginnings

• The supplied pin assignment .csv didn't work for me, but cloning one of the demos worked fine

• Only the 1-bit SDcard interface is supported.

A truly spectacular board.

--- Quote End ---

Hello all,

I got my DE2-70 board and all went good for control pannel but at the same time it is very bad board who want to start embeded processor from this point there are no simple project to use to make a new application from scratch.

If some one can provide me such a file it would be very helpful for me

Regards

--- Quote Start ---

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.[/QUOT

It is good that you have such a nice feeling but I have tried it all the sample and codes are poorly documented and i think it is on purpose many people have the same feeling.

It should provide some example with step by step guidance for rapid prototyping of its

different components.

If you are teaching you could have such samples and i will be really thankful if you can

provide few such samples.

Frahat

Both of you, this attitude is unlikely to get you very far.

Still: download this simple zip with three files: http://thorn.ws/de2-70-flash-leds.zip

This is about the simplest example of a standalone design (it's just flipping bits). I

included the Verilog code below (the indentation is mangled by the altera forum), but you'll need the (trivial) project file and the assignment file from the above zip file. All I did was to take the default example and boil it down.

It really isn't Terasic's job to provide tutorials. That they did anyway to quite impressive.

Regards

Tommy -- (but now I want a DE3!)

module test2(input iCLK_50,

input [17:0] iSW,

output reg [6:0] oHEX0_D, // Seven Segment Digit 0

output reg oHEX0_DP, // Seven Segment Digit 0 decimal point

output reg [6:0] oHEX1_D, // Seven Segment Digit 1

output reg oHEX1_DP, // Seven Segment Digit 1 decimal point

output reg [6:0] oHEX2_D, // Seven Segment Digit 2

output reg oHEX2_DP, // Seven Segment Digit 2 decimal point

output reg [6:0] oHEX3_D, // Seven Segment Digit 3

output reg oHEX3_DP, // Seven Segment Digit 3 decimal point

output reg [6:0] oHEX4_D, // Seven Segment Digit 4

output reg oHEX4_DP, // Seven Segment Digit 4 decimal point

output reg [6:0] oHEX5_D, // Seven Segment Digit 5

output reg oHEX5_DP, // Seven Segment Digit 5 decimal point

output reg [6:0] oHEX6_D, // Seven Segment Digit 6

output reg oHEX6_DP, // Seven Segment Digit 6 decimal point

output reg [6:0] oHEX7_D, // Seven Segment Digit 7

output reg oHEX7_DP, // Seven Segment Digit 7 decimal point

output [17:0] oLEDR);

assign oLEDR = 'h55 ^ iSW;

always @(posedge iCLK_50)

{oHEX5_D,oHEX4_D,oHEX3_D,oHEX2_D,oHEX1_D,oHEX0_D}

<= {oHEX5_D,oHEX4_D,oHEX3_D,oHEX2_D,oHEX1_D,oHEX0_D} + 1;

endmodule

I dont have problem accessing peripherals through FPGA.I am new to NIOS and SOPC

I need some simple examples discussing every step in detail from Hardware to software

development.I am trying to make simple project like controlling LEDs through processor

but every time some starnge errors like processor paused etc...

I have also tried Altera debug client for simple lab tutorials but every time compile give following error.

/usr/bin/bash: nios2-elf-ld: command not found

Compilation stopped.

I need help .

farhat