Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorThanks for your response, they selected me to test run the board, but they didn't hand me a development environment or board-specific example files for bare metal or user space development.
I started creating a compiler because Altera software isn't working on any of my computers so I'm having to program this board in binary. I noticed the internal HPS components were addressable in the memory map, but there's no way to know the hardware addresses for the external hardware. I'll try to initialize the SDRAM, load a binary into the SDRAM but have some type of firmware interpret byte code to try to process commands in real time. If I can read and write directly to hardware, it would be an amazing system. Not sure about setting up FPGA from HPS, but I think that occurs 4 bytes at a time. I tried asking Embest, Altera and Element 14 for a bit of assistance, but Altera told me not to contact them if I needed further assistance, Embest kept pointing to DS-5 Alter Edition but that software isn't working on my Dell or Intel machines. I've tried XP, Win 7 Win 8, Debian Linux. I'd say people should stick with Atmel SAM based boards. Those are also based on Cortex A/M series, and Atmel Studio allows firmware programming over USB where Altera seems to forbid that until they extort $1,000 from you to give you right to program in binary. At $800 a board, the price of the board should include the right to program it. The manufacturer should have also created a compiler for their board. Without knowing how to program it, it's impossible. It'll take about 2 months to finish this compiler. I doubt it is really worth the time or effort to program because I wasn't handed the correct toolz to put the board to use.
