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Cyclone III Starter Kit - USB Communication

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Since the Control Panel application can communicate with the board contents through the default factory design loaded into the FPGA, it must be possible to use this same trick for own designs. For that, a couple of things would be needed. 

 

- From within the custom FPGA design, how to connect to the FDTI USB chip? The pins do not seem to be documented although I suspect the JTAG pins are used for this, which are supposed to be configured as regular IO pins. The C3SK documentation has no reference material on this. 

 

- From the PC side, how would one communicate with the USB Blaster Driver? Of the little I discovered so far, the driver runs as a Service on the host computer which needs to be connected to through the TCP/IP protocol. Is there any SDK or reference material available to use the USB Blaster for serial communication? 

 

If anyone could help me with this would be a god-send. It would be great to write my own PC side software to communicate with specific designs I'm working on. It must be possible as proven by the Control Panel. Now we just need this documented ;)
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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This topic has been discussed in the forum before. All existing control panel applications are connecting the FPGA through JTAG and the virtual JTAG hub. 

Some threads related to Virtual JTAG and JTAG UART: 

http://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4256 

http://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2199 

http://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5730 

http://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4293
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Thanks a lot, that's quite some information which is going to keep me busy for a while digging through :)

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Dear FvM, 

I have similar issues. 

I can get the functions name from alt_jtaglib.dll like "jtag_atlantic_read", "jtag_avalon_init"...., but I don't know how to call them. 

Did you happen to know about the parameters for these functions of alt_jtaglib.dll? 

 

BR, 

Yi
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