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

USB Blaster driver for Max+plus II

I am using MAX+PLUS II trying to program EPM7128STC100-15. I have a USB Blaster download cable. I can not install the driver. The instruction on Altera website does not apply because it's for Quar...
_AK6DN_'s avatar
_AK6DN_
Icon for Frequent Contributor rankFrequent Contributor
1 year ago

I received the MasterBlaster from the eBay seller. It is a complete kit, new in box, still sealed.

So I opened it up and it has both serial COM port and USB port interfaces, so I tried out the USB side.

I could not get it to be recognized on my Win10 QuartusII 13.0sp1 setup (that is the oldest I have).

Per the Altera documents Quartus 8.1 was the last version to support this device, so not unsurprising.

I did also open it up a take a picture of the PCB. It is an incredibly complex design inside, much more so than the follow

on USBBlaster/II series which was just an FTDI232 USB chip, an EPM7K cpld, and some buffers and drivers.

This MasterBlaster has a large FLEX10K FPGA, one appears to be a Motorola CPU, a large EEPROM, what appears to be a Cypress

USB interface, and a number of smaller buffers and logic devices. Backside is just a few small discretes. At the bottom is what

appears to be a 6-12V to 5V switching power supply (or it can work from the 5V USB power also).

So I can see why Altera EOLed this device in favor of the much simpler/cheaper UsbBlaster/II series PODs.

FvM's avatar
FvM
Icon for Super Contributor rankSuper Contributor
1 year ago
Hi,
as mentioned above, it's unlikely that you can use MasterBlaster over USB with recent Windows versions because there's no driver for it. Use UART.
  • Eagle_Savy's avatar
    Eagle_Savy
    Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
    1 year ago

    Hi Gents,

    Thanks a million for helping me along with this.

    So, the advice from you would be to use this newly purchased Blaster with an old PC running WIN2K or WINXP the latest, or would there be another possibility?

    @FvM : reading through the materials you kindly attached the link to in your previous response about the USB2LPT Conversion, I did not see any of the Altera listed in amongst the "Chip Programmers" tested. Would this be something I can consider using?

    KR

    Savvy_Eagle