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Recently I purchased an Altera FPGA Development/Education Board from eBay. It can be found here (
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/ebayisapi.dll?viewitem&item=271296245565).
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I do not recognize this as an "official" Altera Education board; they were UP1, UP2, UP3 from SLS, and then the DE2 series from Terasic.
This board is just "a development kit with an Altera device on it".
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When I came to Altera's website for additional information I could not find much of anything. My assumption is that this board is outdated. Reason for this is because the chip says,
"cyclone ep1c3t144c8n." When searching Altera's website for this chip I could not find any documentation about it. Under the Quartus II software download I saw Cyclone II support and above, but none for the original Cyclone.
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The Cyclone handbook is still there
http://www.altera.com/literature/lit-cyc.jsp --- Quote Start ---
Am I missing something from
Altera.com --- Quote End ---
No, the piece of the puzzle you are missing is the schematic to the board. Once you have that you can install an older version of the Quartus II Web Edition software, and you're all set.
I have many old development kits, and installations of Quartus (in Virtual Machines). Supporting old kits is not that hard.
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or am I just screwed with no documentation support from the seller (unbeknownst to me). I have however emailed them asking for a datasheet, but I certainly won't put counting much on that.
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That would have been my suggestion ... perhaps post a new message with the question "Does anyone recognize this kit" and put the photo inline in the message.
You can also reverse engineer the design. Its only a TQFP device, so you can probe the pins ... tedious, but it would allow you to determine the connections on the board.
For example, create a design where all the pins are configured as GPIO, tri-stated by default, and then read all the pins, change the toggle switches one-by-one, and read the pins. Then for the LEDs toggle an output. The problem with outputs is you might damage the FPGA driver, so you might want to probe for the output connections using an ohmmeter.
The other thing to try, is to look at the markings on the board, or find it for sale from another vendor and see if they have the documentation.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
