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Altera_Forum
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17 years ago

Reference design for Nios II Embedded Evaluation Kit, Cyclone III

Hi all... Part of my final year project I should built a system in FPGA to control Actuators through the connection RS_232 from the Nios II Embedded Evaluation Kit, Cyclone III ... I would...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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17 years ago

Can you make a daughterboard with the HMSC connector on it? If you can spin a custom daughterboard, just pick some GPIO pins on the HMSC connector to be your serial signals. You can use the Samtec# ASP-122952-01 as the mating connector, just watch the pin numbers as some pins on the Starter kit have been depopulated. (it will be a beast to solder the grounding rails by hand, but for RS232 at moderate speeds it should be 'good enough' even with the grounds poorly connected)

If you can't spin the custom board, terasic sells a gpio breakout board (http://www.altera.com/products/devices/cyclone3/design/cy3-devkits.html) for $50 that you could easily bolt your breadboarded serial port circuit to.

If you don't want to prototype any circuit (and you have a couple hundred $$), you could upgrade to the neek (http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?language=english&categoryno=39&no=240), which has a RS-232 output on it already.

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