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Ok I'm going back to basics with the My First Nios II tutorial (which I had originally skipped). Can you suggest some other examples or other sources through which I might start learning soft core processors?
Many thanks,
Rajas
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Getting a little off topic, but...
Work thru that myfirstniosII, and any other examples you would like, exactly as the provided instructions say with the same version of the tools that the example was created with so that any problem you have cannot be blamed on the tools. They are complicated tools, and no one is lucky enough to guess all the configuration options and get a working system.
After you get a NIOSII up and running and can single step thru the C code in the debugger in Eclipse...
Add a simple FSM to blink an LED at a 0.5hz rate and get that going along with the NIOSII blinking it's own LED and shooting hello world out the jtag-uart (default hello world application in eclipse combined with a simple bit of VHDL (or verilog)) -- I used the myfirstniosII example.
Then wire the LED-FSM output and its compliment to the NIOSII as an input and add a 3rd and 4th led controlled (and code to TLE and code to eclipse and connections in QSYS) so that the NIOSII can blink it to 'follow' the FSM's output/compliment. Then make it all fit inside the FPGA, you'll need to figure out how to modify the BSP so that your code will fit... and also when/how to bypass Altera's HAL (and what that is!) And you will probably see eclipse show you some error messages about segments not fitting and you will learn how to fix them.
Then start deleting components from SOPC (and adding different ones to interface to the other board HW) and seeing how that works so you know how to connect/configure things like GPIOs and additional uarts. And learn to recognize what is what in Qsys/SOPC. Essentially directed play with the environment. The DMA hookups and code are sort of complex for the TSE if you don't understand how the simple stuff works.
Also, there are quite a few changes that need to be made to swap over to the latest version of quartus/qsys... none of them are difficult--all very simple, but there are a lot and if you don't have a rudimentary understanding of how Altera's toolchain works, it is very easy to mess up the TSE example project while 'upgrading' it. The upgrade to Qsys and later versions of the tools essentially gives you upgraded hardware, but for most purposes the old version will probably function sufficiently.
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