I am studying the remote update IP, and I want to use it in our product. The FPGA is 5CEBA4F17C8, and the existing eeprom is M25P16 (2Mbyte, EPCS16 is very expensive), and I am planing to replace it with M25P32(4Mbyte).
I roughly understand the remote mechanism by reading document. And my plan is to store a factory image and a application image in the same eeprom. I have the following questions about that:
1. Which kind of files should be used?
I always generate .sof and .elf, and download to FPGA with nios2-flash-programmer. The sof & elf image is so large, but nois-flash-programmer only download 1408kB + 128 kB. I guess there is some compression and decompression operations. Now I need to download the image file with my own PC software. I am not familiar with Altera's configuration file types, and I don't know how to get the compressed download file.
Could some people give me help? Some examples would be greatly appreciated.
2. In factory mode, how to judge whether should reconfigure to application mode?
My plan is, check the reconfiguration trigger conditions, if it is watchdog timeout, then waiting the PC to refresh the application image. Or it is normally boot up sequence, and automatically reconfigure the application image. Am I right?
Please give me some suggestion, thank you!
Derek
