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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
11 years agoThe Cyclone V Soc kit has a USB port that can be used as master, but it's possible that it's directly connected to the ARM core and can't be used from a custom hardware design. Besides its price may be out of your range.
It's probably more cost effective to use Ethernet as you suggested. At lot of kits have it, some of them not so expensive. Remember to plan some time ahead to familiarize yourself with the Ethernet protocol on the Altera kits, especially if you want to act directly on the Ethernet packets at the hardware level. Examples on the wiki such as the udp offload example (http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/nios_ii_udp_offload_example) show how to generate and receive Ethernet packets directly in HDL code.