Any chance of altera doing the following: 1) write an upload stub which when it goes to upload a program it downloads the stub via jtag into memory and starts executing. 2) the stub simply contains a small program which initialises the ethernet interface and then waits for a connection 3) after the stub begins to execute the pc then downloads the program via ethernet and then starts executing that program. 4) compile, repeat, compile, repeat, etc....! Presumably you could get the stub very small. This would be far sweeter than downloading large programs over the byteblaster. Adrian

I think you have bigger problems if a 30KB/s download isn&#39;t fast enough. If you&#39;re code is that big then you might want a single board computer.

--- Quote Start --- originally posted by badomen@Aug 9 2004, 09:43 AM i think you have bigger problems if a 30kb/s download isn&#39;t fast enough. if you&#39;re code is that big then you might want a single board computer. --- Quote End --- Why, what a strange comment, I don&#39;t understand?! If I&#39;ve got lots of look up tables which are embedded into the executable (Which I had under Nios I), then I could well have (say) more than 4 mb of program code which needs to be uploaded everytime, becomes quite tedious if your trying to test something and it takes a minute or so to upload. Adrian

As I mentioned in another thread, the Excaliburs came with example code that ran a webserver using the embedded ARM processor. You could upload a .sof to the webserver (over Ethernet, of course) and the ARM would program the FPGA with it - that&#39;s one big advantage to having your processor in hardware. The code for that might make a good starting-point.

yes, our excalibers on Nios I also came with the web server demo which also allowed you to upload code, what I&#39;ve suggested is nothing more (and infact simpler) than what they already did before, it&#39;d just be nice for it to hook into the IDE nicely. Adrian

If you have a lot of look up tables why not store them into a secondary memory location (like flash for example) and make sure that it does not get reset everytime you dump new software out onto the board (i.e. allocate the memory yourself). Also what kind of times are we talking here, anything under a minute I would say is acceptible (anything more means you just need to be checking your work more and reducing the number of compiles like hardware developers do (I think you can guess what I do)).

Code Uploader | Altera Community

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
21 years ago
--- Quote Start ---
originally posted by kerri@Aug 9 2004, 03:48 PM
i'm not sure. hopefully they'd have it coming through a uk distributor.
--- Quote End ---

Ahh that'd probably also make more sense. It says something like "wont ship until 30 september", I kind of read that as altera wont ship them until 30th september, i.e it'd come from the states.

Maybe I'll check it out in the store and see what it figures for shipping.

Adrian
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
21 years ago
Shipping to New Zealand was listed at about US$40. but the site wouldnt accept my credit card anyway. I think because they were checking the billing address against what the credit card company listed and found a difference because they had insisted that I put down a value for what state that I lived in but we don't have any states in New Zealand.
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
21 years ago
They'll have to figure that out... I'll send your post over to ??someone??

I asked about the cost. I was told. This really isn't a 'get a USB blaster for free" program. It's a if you're having problems, here's a 300 dollar cable for the cost of shipping.

So, I guess it's a great cheap way of getting one. Plus they're super fast and look cool!

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