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Altera_Forum
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10 years ago

More than one USB Blaster connected to a host system

Has anyone been successful hooking up more than one USB Blaster to a host system, to connect to multiple development systems, for FPGA programming and/or Signal TAP II? Did you run multiple instances of SignalTap II, one per USB Blaster, or just one instance of SignalTap II, connecting to only one USB Blaster + one development system at a time?

Our current method is to move one USB Blaster cable around from development system to development system, but that does not work remotely, someone has to be in the lab. We would prefer not to waste the lab space having one dedicated host system for every development system.

9 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    Hi,

    There should be no issue to use multiple usb blaster with a single PC. I have used that before with transceiver toolkit and interface with a few devkits at the same time.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    Note that some USB devices won't work with multiple instances of the same device unless they have unique serial numbers programmed. I don't know if this is true of the USB blaster. If it is, then some of the clones might not have different serial numbers.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    there is some time the driver do contribute some factor on this matter.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    We've had up to 8 USB blasters connected to the same Linux server with no problem. It should work with Windows too.

    Usually I have one separate signaltap instance for each USB blaster I'm connected to, if I need to debug several targets at the same time.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    I've had 9 connected to the same Windows PC before and they have all worked fine together.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    hi David, maybe this only happen on your certain usb port? or consider a driver reinstall?

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    Similar to TCWORLD, I have done multiple USB blasters connected to same Windows PC as well when debugging interfaces between different boards. They seems to work as expected.