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I am an experimental physicist, and have very limited programming experience (mostly very high level things like matlab). I purchased a DE0 Nano board because I very much want to learn/play with fpga's. I've gone through the basic "tutorials" and examples, and can do such things as light up various LEDs on the board. However, I am struggling to find beginner/intermediate type examples of code to teach me how to do more, like interface the board with an external device.
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Welcome to the world of FPGAs. You're in for fun :)
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My question is this: Does anyone have an explicit example/tutorial doing something like "how to program, connect, and setup your DE0 Nano board to record temperature for x amount of time, and save the data to a csv file". That would be the perfect level of what I need to see right now, via an example. I have a very limited experience with microcontrollers, but doing such a thing seems much easier with them than the fpga. That said, I want to learn how to do these type of things with the board.
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Go through this tutorial here:
http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/using_the_usb-blaster_as_an_sopc/qsys_avalon-mm_master_tutorial Its not quite what you asked for, but it'll give you a good feel for how to use the tools and what each tool is good for. Since you know MATLAB, understanding a scripting language like Tcl will be easy for you.
I did not have a DE0-nano when I wrote that tutorial, so did not include a version of it that would run 'out-of-the-box' on the DE0-nano. I have the board now, so can add it if you like. However, it would be better for you to have a go at it first, and ask questions.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
