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I'm fairly new to Altera technology.
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Sorry your initial experience sucks, though its not Altera's fault, its Larkboard's fault ... and yours a little bit for not doing your homework before buying it :)
I'd noticed Element14 promoting the Lark board, but I did not see any details on a "golden reference design" and the like, so I did not spend anymore time looking at it. Most importantly, I did not see any developers posting patches on the U-Boot mailing list. The Altera developers have been posting patches for their boards, the Arrow SoCKit board, and the Denx MCV boards.
The first thing to understand/appreciate is that the Altera SoCs are new devices, and so you'll have to experience a little pain to get started.
Altera have put their SoC support onto a site called
RocketBoards.org http://www.rocketboards.org/ Here's the Lark board page (but no reference design);
http://www.rocketboards.org/foswiki/documentation/embestsoclarkevaluationboard I have the Arrow SoCKit, but have not had an opportunity to use it yet. That board and the Terasic boards are cheaper than the main Altera kit, and they have support on the RocketBoards site.
If you have to get an SoC working ASAP for real work, then you may want to consider putting the Lark board aside, getting an SoCKit, getting that to work, and then going back to the Lark board once you are comfortable with the tools. If you're just "playing" with the Lark board, then by all means beat yourself up and get it working. In the end you'll be an SoC expert :)
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I'm used to creating firmware with AVR32 placing programs into internal Flash of the MCU, and I was wondering if there was an equivalent method for doing the same thing with the on-chip bootROM of the Altera SoC?
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FPGAs and SoCs can boot from a variety of external memory, or you can download them via a JTAG cable. This is similar to how AVRs work, so it'll feel similar to you.
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Can we load our programs into bootROM through the USB Blaster II like Atmel allows with their line of boards?
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Yes.
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None of the Altera software is working on my computers
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Details? I have Quartus working under Windows XP, Windows 7, and Centos 7 (real machines and VirtualBox virtual machines). These are all supported platforms.
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The exact board I have is here:
http://www.embest-tech.com/shop/star/lark-board.html But none of the companies are offering tech support, not even the manufacturer.
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Seriously? That is crazy.
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In all, I have 20 years of programming experience, and this is the first board I've come across that I can't program.
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You can program it. You've got not figured out how yet, be patient :)
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They didn't even include any bare metal or user space examples files so programming has to occur in pure binary.
This board is going to fail miserably in the marketplace since they don't want people to program their boards.
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I agree.
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At $800 a board, people should just stick with Atmel boards, they too use ARM Cortex at hundreds of dollars less.
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This is a valid observation. If you just need a processor, then a BeagleBone or SAM board is definitely a cheaper and "easier" option.
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It is currently useless in it current unprogrammed state without having a way to program firmware or binary programs on it.
Here's picture of a screenshot showing the SDRAM registers, it's going to be a chore to figure out the order they're written in.
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Actually, it should not really be that hard. The SDRAM registers are specific to the SoC, not to the Lark board.
Chances are a "bare metal" design for one of the other boards would work with the Lark board.
I find it hard to believe that there are no reference designs for the Lark board though. Who have you talked to? Embest? Element14? If you purchased the board from Element14 or Farnell, then talk to one of their Field Application Engineers (FAEs). Its their job to make sure you are a satisfied customer, so they should be able to get you a reference design.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
