Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorI ordered a THDB_ADA daughter card for the Cyclone III Starter Board directly from Terasic and received it last week. There are no general purpose I/Os on the daughter board. No, you don't need a cable.
I had two problems with the board that took me a few days to resolve. At first, I had no A/D input or D/A output signals. This turned out to be because the POWER ON signal was not being asserted due to a missing pull-up resistor (R59). From the schematic it looks like they may have sent me a board intended for the DE3 although I ordered one for the Cyclone III Starter Board. Once I added this resistor things started working. However, when I loaded the demo project (top level entity QB3_TOP.v) I found that bit 10 of ADC channel B was stuck at '1'. Here is line 209 of the code: assign HSMC_TX_N[11] = 1; It turns out that this signal is bit 10 of the ADC B! Once this line is commented out and the project is recompiled everything seems to be working. Two other comments: 1) To run the intermod product demo described in the User guide you will need MATLAB. 2) The ADA_Utility implements a very simple two channel waveform generator and free-running digital scope. It works fine, but no source code is provided.
