Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
12 years ago

Communication FPGA with MATLAB

hi I have FPGA DE0-Nano and would communicate with FPGA via USB. Anybody know the process that I flow? Thank you
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
12 years ago

The USB on the DE0-nano is really dedicated for programming the board. Although I guess it would be possible to re-program the MAX device to make it work, it's more hassle than it's worth.

Your best bet is to add a USB to Serial FTDI chip to the board. Sparkfun makes small breakout boards that work great.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/718

Now your computer will see a USB serial device (and more importantly will have the correct drivers already), and adding a UART to your FPGA code is fairly trivial.

Many of the boards that do have USB, (unless is specifically design for USB development) tend to go this route with a USB-to-Serial device on the board.

I know the SOCKit from Terasic is like this.

Pete