Troubles with the DE1 board - SD card and music player demo...

...Greetings everyone!

I'm a third year computer engineering student at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and recently I've acquired the DE1 development board for my studies at teh university. Our labs typically use the DE2 boards, so I'm pioneering the DE1 for the student body.

In our next lab we're asked to build a music player that reads in a file from the SD card, very similar to one of the demonstrations included on the DE1 CD.

I built the NIOS II core in the SOPC builder and wired the additional components in Quartus, and at first I used the DE1_pin_assignments.csv pinout file found on the CD. However, strangely enough the SD_CLK, SD_CMD and SD_DAT pinouts were not included in it. I took the schematics of the DE1 and manually added them. At compilation I got the error:

Error: Can't place pins assigned to pin location Pin_W20 (IOC_X50_Y2_N1)

Info: Pin SD_DAT is assigned to pin location Pin_W20 (IOC_X50_Y2_N1)

Info: Pin ~LVDS91p/nCEO~ is assigned to pin location Pin_W20 (IOC_X50_Y2_N1)

So something has already been pre-assigned to the pin?

Puzzling that, I figured that I would try to run the demo provided on the CD (DE1_SD_Card_Audio) and if it works see if I can use its interface with the SD card. I programmed the DE1_SD_Card_Audio.sof and opened the folder with the NIOS II IDE. The IDE opened a project called hello_led_0. When attempting to build the project the compilations halts and gives the error:

make: *** No rule to make target `C:/DE1/DE1_SD_Card_Audio/system_0.ptf', needed by `/cygdrive/c/DE1_SD_Card_Audio/hello_led_0_syslib/Debug/system_description/../obj/generated_app.mk-t'. Stop.

If trying to run the project without building and selecting the Nios II hardware configuration , I get the error:

The associated Nios II system library project for the application project is referencing a non-existent SOPC Builder system file. Please select the application project, and select Project->Properties->Associated System Library to choose a different system library project.

So the SOPC file under syslib seems to be invalid as well.

This sums my troubles with the DE1 board and the SD card. I'm sure that I'm missing something small, and getting the SD card interface pinouts to work with my original project should be a trivial task, I'm just not experienced enough with the board yet. As for the demo, I had downloaded the latest version from Terasic, so I'd imagine that it should have worked.

Thank you in advance for any help,

Dmitri

P.S. I forgot to mention that if the DE1 is programmed with the demo .sof file and with the SD card properly formatted with FAT16, the audio file on it and the card itself properly inserted the only sound from the headphones is a flash of static if the pushbutton KEY[0] is pressed.