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Can't get C5G Control Panel v 1.0.2 to connect to Cyclone V GX Starter Kit board

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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I get a popup dialog box with the following message: please make sure quartus is installed! when I attempt to connect the Control Panel running on my Windows 7 PC to the Cyclone V GX Starter Kit board. I have the USB Blaster cable properly connected and the driver is installed. The device shows up in the Windows Device Manager as: altera usb-blaster. I have not reprogrammed the FPGA, it still has the original demonstration program installed and running. I have Quartus II 64 Bit version 15.0.2 installed and running. Please advise.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Hi, 

 

Normally we will use the BTS or the QII to interface with the CV GX starter kit instead of using control panel.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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So what you are saying is not to use the Control Panel? You have an entire chapter in your CG5 User Manual devoted to using it: this doesn't make any sense to me. 

 

 

 

--- Quote Start ---  

Hi, 

 

Normally we will use the BTS or the QII to interface with the CV GX starter kit instead of using control panel. 

--- Quote End ---  

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Altera_Forum
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So I'm afraid my out-of-the-box experience turned into a nightmare. I watched a youTube video entitled: "Low Cost FPGA Kits Available Now" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1ov9ve4s2s that walks through the out-of-box experience and makes it all look so simple. I wish I could say I had the same experience but I did not. There is obviously a problem because if I follow the steps presented in the video, I do not achieve successful results. I tried a second Cyclone V GX Starter Kit board and had exactly the same results which points to some sort of USB Blaster driver problem or a problem with the latest version of Quartus® II software. 

 

The board looks like a great board but it currently useless to my company.
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Altera_Forum
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Normally at my side, I would use BTS to verify the board functionality and then create my own designs to work with this board. So far, I have never work with the Control Panel before, so could not comment further. You might want to contact your local sales or MySupport to check with Altera on this.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
1,284 Views

 

--- Quote Start ---  

Normally at my side, I would use BTS to verify the board functionality and then create my own designs to work with this board. So far, I have never work with the Control Panel before, so could not comment further. You might want to contact your local sales or MySupport to check with Altera on this. 

--- Quote End ---  

 

 

Our support guy is coming in today to take a look at the problem. We have reproduced the problem on multiple systems running at least 2 different versions of Quartus II. Sorry to sound like an idiot but I'm new to Altera so could you tell me what BTS stands for? It sounds like it really works so I am definately interested in using it. 

 

Thanks
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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BTS is the Board Test System which normally come together with the kit installation. It is equipped with some ready designs and GUI for you to quickly test out some features available on a development kit.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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I understand the board built by Altera will have BTS. But the Cyclone V GX Starter kit is built by Terasic. Maybe they will have different name for BTS. You can further check with Terasic.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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I had the same problem and asked Terasic what to do. Their solution was to first load the C5G_ControlPanel.sof file onto the board using Quartus Programmer. After that, the Control Panel was able to connect.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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--- Quote Start ---  

I had the same problem and asked Terasic what to do. Their solution was to first load the C5G_ControlPanel.sof file onto the board using Quartus Programmer. After that, the Control Panel was able to connect. 

--- Quote End ---  

 

 

Thank you for sharing the solution.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Hi ortonmc, 

 

Thanks for the solution.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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As it turns out, there were a couple of problems that needed to be fixed on my installation. There are several scripts that look for files to be located in hard-coded directories. This means you need to accept installation defaults if you want the scripts to work or, you have to alter the scripts to match your personal installation directories. In addition, as I was going through the Terasic documentation I noticed that the Terasic demonstrations and utility software were all developed for Quartus II version 13.1. I would suggest using this version if you want the example code to work properly. If you are running Windows, you should also make sure that your system-level environmental variables are setup to point to the proper installation directories after installing Quartus II. I had a problem with this because I had done multiple installations and the variables were setup wrong for the last version of Quartus II that I installed. 

 

After making these changes, everything is working properly on my system.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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I just wanted to say thanks for the answers in this thread, they've been incredibly helpful in getting my kit up and running for the first time. 

 

One thing I'd like to add in case it saves someone trouble later, in my case I had already installed the USB Blaster drivers from Quartus Prime Lite 15.1, which seem to be troublesome, at least for this board. Things appeared to work fine in the Quartus Programmer (but not in the control panel), but on my machine they caused a BSOD a few minutes after programming - not a great first time experience! 

 

In the end, uninstalling these drivers and using the ones from Quartus 13.1.0.162 solved both the control panel issues and the BSODs for me.  

 

It might be possible to update Quartus but keep the old drivers (perhaps someone here can confirm?), I haven't attempted this yet though.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Agree with you. ControlPanel issue resolved using Quartus 13.1

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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--- Quote Start ---  

I had the same problem and asked Terasic what to do. Their solution was to first load the C5G_ControlPanel.sof file onto the board using Quartus Programmer. After that, the Control Panel was able to connect. 

--- Quote End ---  

 

 

 

How do I program in a .sof file?
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
1,284 Views

 

--- Quote Start ---  

How do I program in a .sof file? 

--- Quote End ---  

 

 

Read this from front to back: https://www.altera.com/literature/tt/tt_my_first_fpga.pdf 

(https://www.altera.com/literature/tt/tt_my_first_fpga.pdf

or jump to page 1-41 to go directly to programming a device from a .sof
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