DE10 - where can I get started?

Altera_Forum · ‎12-06-2017

I've recently purchased a DE10-Nano board, and ... I'm struggling to get started with it. My best guess is that I just can't find the right documentation and/or example projects. All my project needs to do is to connect my FPGA peripheral/component to one of the HPS controlled buses, to be able to read and write registers from my component, etc. Building such a peripheral should be easy--I've been working with FPGA's for several years. The software portion that will interact with this peripheral should be even easier to build--I've been writing software and embedded software for decades now.

Where I'm struggling is figuring out how to create a design that then works with the rest of the system: uboot, Linux, etc. I'll need Ethernet and SDRAM, but not necessarily HDMI, or any of the other wonderful parts of the board.

I started with the documentation that came with a reference CD I could download. However, when I tried working with this reference design in Qsys, it immediately upgraded all of the components. When I then finished building the design, nothing worked--the ARM never got past the past loading the FPGA during U-Boot. After loading the FPGA, things hung and I could never figure out why. My guess is that I tried building a design with Quartus 17 which was built for Quartus 16.0 or below, although until I finish figuring out the problem I doubt I'll truly know.

So, I started looking for a golden hardware design that worked which I could build and then modify. I found a variety of Cyclone-V SoC images on RocketBoards, but when I just copied them to an SD-Card for a sanity check to make sure they would work, then I didn't even get as as far as I had before. (No messages on the console) I get the feeling that these images are inappropriate for the DE10-Nano (I don't really know), but can't seem to find where a good De10-Nano starting point should be.

Can anyone therefore point me to a working design that I can modify and then rebuild for the DE10?

Thanks,

Dan

Altera_Forum · ‎12-07-2017

Never mind, I managed to get the golden design from the DE10 CD working with Quartus 17.1. I'm not sure what all I changed, but I started back at the beginning with a brand new project, placed *ONLY* the GHRD into the project, and ... it worked.

Now I can make changes and know that, if any thing stops working, the difference was the changes.

Dan