DE1 Board broken??!

[Altera_Forum]

Hello, 

 I added some extra hardware to the Terasic DE1 board by connecting it over the GPIO1 square header. When pressing the power button the board doesn't start up. When I remove my extra hardware it still powers up. However, I noticed that there are some pins not working anymore after trying my extra stuff :( I just drove all pins of GPIO1 high and measured that some pins aren't 3.3V! What's propably wrong with it and what can I do? PLEASE HELP:cry:

[Altera_Forum]

Describe what do you have attached and how..

[Altera_Forum]

Here are some pics of my setup: 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41173070/pics/100_8114.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41173070/pics/100_8115.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41173070/pics/100_8116.jpg   I didn't load any design on the fpga when I attached my additional hardware. It was the default configuration which normally doesn't use the GPIO ports.

[Altera_Forum]

perhaps a short?

[Altera_Forum]

hm, so what could be possibly broken on the Board?

[Altera_Forum]

Probably FPGA is damaged but replacing it is not trivial.. check also onboard regulator

[Altera_Forum]

What's this onboard regulator you're talking about?

[Altera_Forum]

When you use 7.5V DC adapter or USB cable voltage is regulted to VCCint of FPGA (ex. 1.2 Volt), check if voltage (VCCio and VCCint) on FPGA is ok

[Altera_Forum]

I don't know where I can find those test points, but there's a 3.3V test point on the pcb which is ok (3.308V).

[Altera_Forum]

I don't have that FPGA unfortunately, only one DE0-Nano..

[Altera_Forum]

ok 

Do you know how I can avoid shorts in the future? Maybe there's something I can solder on my experimental pcbs?

[Altera_Forum]

You have to carefully check your pcb before connecting it to FPGA, test it with a low-cost MCU before..

[Altera_Forum]

yeah, that's what I did. But it happened.... 

What about some fuses?

[Altera_Forum]

Maybe a large parasite capacitive load..

[Altera_Forum]

Stripboard isn't really suitable for wiring stuff to the GPIO headers on a DE1, because the header pins are only one row of holes apart, so it's tricky to break the tracks between opposite pins on the header.  

 If you *didn't* break the tracks between them I'm not surprised the board got fried! If you look at the DE1's schematic, you'll see that pin 11 on the GPIO headers carries +5v, but the pin opposite, pin 12, is grounded. Likewise for pins 29 & 30, +3.3v and gnd respectively.  With your board connected, +5v, gnd and +3.3v were all shorted together, which explains why it wouldn't start up, and why something got fried.

[Altera_Forum]

I had not noticed.. yes there are many shorts!