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I want to design in a USB Blaster type adaptor on my ARM board so I can test and program the entire system in situ. I have a spare USB port. It sounds like a good idea in principle but is there a reference design somewhere for this? Is the Altera USB Blaster design open source?
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There is no open-source USB-Blaster design. There is some information on the web on the protocol used over USB, but you also have to emulate the FTDI FT245 protocol, which is also undocumented. The undocumented protocols can be traced using Wireshark under Linux, however, there's no guarantee you will manage to decode to entire protocol. Even if you manage to decode most of the protocol and get something to work, Altera could require a Quartus update that subsequently breaks your reverse engineering and you'll have to start again (Apple have done this type of thing several times to stop you jailbreaking their phones).
If you don't care that Quartus cannot recognize your board, then your ARM micro can still be used to configure the FPGA and perform in-situ tests.
What functionality
must you support?
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
