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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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21 years ago

Production line board test

Once you get your Nios design into production, what kind of setup do you use for configuration and test?

It seems unrealistic to expect each test station to have a full Quartus install, even if the license is free. Besides, what I envision is a single piece of test code running on a PC that automates the whole process of low level board test, programming the EPCS device, and then running some embedded test firmware on the target board. This whole process should not require much operator intervention.

So are people using the stand-alone Quartus programmer with a XXXBlaster cable, or some other custom solution?

Does the stand-alone programmer require installation of a license file?

Is there a similar stand-alone solution for programming the flash?

thanks

4 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    21 years ago

    .... additional question:

    can I perhaps install CYGWIN on a separate windows machine and use the perl-script generated by flash-programmer (xxx.sh) together with the NIOS tools 'sof2flash' , 'elf2flash' and 'nios2-flash-programmer' to have a stand-alone solution ?

    Mike

    p.s.

    CYGWIN is free and is a Linux-like environment for Windows (www.cygwin.com)
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    21 years ago

    Hi Mike,

    I suppose it depends on your system. If you are using EPCS serial flash, it may be possible to get away with using only the (free) Quartus standalone programmer. I think this is just a free Altera download.. if any license is required there should be no cost (send in a nic or hard drive ID and get a license file by email, if anything).

    The procedure is to (on a computer with all of the dev tools installed) roll up the fpga .sof file and software .srec file into a single file that the programmer can use in a production line situation... I recently helped out a customer (added some conversion functionality into nios-convert) that went into 1.1 for this purpose, which converted our .srec into i-hex that the quartus convert programming files utility uses to combine data into a single programming file. Since it requires several steps to perform it is not a highlighted feature though.

    If you are using parallel flash and aren&#39;t programming flash in some conventional programmer before soldering onto the board, then your idea bout using the command-line nios2-flash-programmer tool is a good one. This will still require installation of quartus + nios to get all the tools in place, but you can feel free to experiment with the flash programmer java executables if you&#39;d like in order to run in a more standalone mode (quite honestly I don&#39;t know if this will work -- but it sounds like its worth a try)... even if that does not work, I don&#39;t see any reason why you should need a license file for it to operate as command line tools such as the flash programmer aren&#39;t doing things like HW compilation or generation, which do use the license files http://forum.niosforum.com/work2/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    20 years ago

    Has anyone pursued this further?

    The standalone Quartus programmer works great for pof,sof,jic, but I need the ability to download an srec or binary file (u-boot) to sram and have it execute. As far as I can tell, the Quartus programmer can&#39;t do that. Right now I use nios2-download from the Nios tools, but the 400MB+ install for this one feature is undesirable.

    I see two ways. The first is to take the nios2-download script and figure out the minimal set of components needed to support it - maybe cygwin plus the jtag drivers.

    The second is to figure out how the jtag interface to the nios works and write some code to send the data directly.

    If anyone has any success with either of these two methods, or some other obvious method I have missed, please post.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    20 years ago

    Hi all,

    has anybody figured out which files and directories are necessary to run nios2-flash-programmer script as a minimum standalone solution ?

    Mike