First semester week

The semester has just started and I couldn’t register, my plans didn’t go the way I want it, I start a new job a couple of weeks ago, allegedly I was going to continue with my studies part time dealing with my thesis and a couple of courses to complete with the credits needed to graduate. I email an activity plan for my thesis defining my goals for this semester but didn’t receive a response. I never tough that it would be like this; One of my concerns from school for this semester was that there was no attractive courses and incredibly there not even a list of the opening courses, the list is made on the week that registration process takes places that completely sucks even you need to make paper work in order to be enrolled, for a computer engineering research institute that tells you a lot.

Anyway I’m enjoying my job it very exciting and at the moment I’m in Korea where my main problem is communication almost nobody speaks english neither spanish ordering at lunch time is difficult when no pictures are available on the menu.

————————————————————————————————

El semestre ha iniciado y no pude registrarme, mis planes no salieron como esperaba, hace unas semanas inicie con un nuevo empleo, supuestamente iba a continuar con mis estudios en modalidad de medio tiempo trabajando sobre mi tesis y un par de cursos para cubrir los créditos necesarios para graduarme. Mande por correo-e mi plan de actividades de mi tesis para el semestre pero no recibí respuesta, nunca imagine que seria de esta forma; Una de mis preocupaciones del semestre era la falta de algún curso atractivo, increíblemente ni siquiera hay una lista de los cursos por impartir, esta se forma en la misma semana del proceso de re-inscripción, también tienes que realizar una serie de papeleo que para un instituto de investigación en computación dice mucho.

De cualquier forma estoy disfrutando de mi nuevo empleo, en estos momentos me encuentro en Corea donde mi principal problema es de comunicación casi nadie habla ingles y mucho menos español ordenar a la hora de la comida es difícil cuando no hay fotos disponibles en el menú.

Altera Quartus 2 on Fedora 11

On the past months I was enrolled in a “Hardware Description Languages” course where we work with FPGAs implementing several hardware designs, the class cover VHDL and Verilog and I feel quite comfortable working with Verilog. As target platform I use an Altera DE2 devboard and Quartus II IDE;

Installing Quartus II is quite trivial on Fedora 11

1. Install tcsh shell

su -c “yum install tcsh”

2. From www.altera.com/download

Download Quartus II web-install script

3. Give executable permissions to the script

chmod +x 90_altera_webinstall.sh

4. Install dependencies for the installer script (Only for 64 bit systems)

su -c “yum install glibc.i586 glibc-devel.i586″

su -c “yum install libSM.i586 libzip.i586 libXi.i586 libXrender.i586 libXrandr.i586″

su -c “yum install freetype.i586 fontconfig.i586″

5. Run the Quartus II web-install script

./90_altera_webinstall.sh

Follow the installer

6. Edit ~/.bashrc file and add the path for “quartus/bin”

export PATH=$PATH:/<quartus-install-dir>/quartus/bin

7. Open a new terminal and launch Quartus II IDE

quartus –64bit

With the previous steps you have Quartus II installed, you can now create your own design and simulate them, for downloading your designs to the FPGA you will need a helper script that will start/stop the jtag demon and to create a udev rule file to allow all user to access the usb-blaster device.

On DE2 development platform usb-blaster is used to interface the Jtag server and the FPGA. I have found some references about using usb-blaster in Linux by adding udev rules to properly handle the usb programmer.

8. Create a udev rules file at /etc/udev/rules.d/ such as 30-usb-blaster.rules

Add the following lines

# Altera DE2 USB blaster udev rules
# Adrian Alonso <aalonso00@gmail.com>
#
SUBSYSTEM==”usb”,SYSFS{idVendor}==”09fb”,SYSFS{idProduct}==”6001″,MODE=”0666″,SYMLINK+=”usb-blaster”

Basically when the Usb-blaster is connected to the computer, the udev rules are triggered and based on the idVendor and idProduct values a dev node is created /dev/usb-blaster whit the permissions for Read/Write for every user.

Reload udev rules

su -c “udevcontrol –reload_rules”

*Note: This is only necessary the first time to enable the new rules.

9. Copy the next script and place the script at /<quartus-install-dir>/quartus/bin/
*Note: Change the JTAGD variable for the correct path.
————————————————————————————————–
#!/bin/bash
# Jtag server for usb-blaster
# Based on Dalon Jtagd script
# Reference: http://forum.niosforum.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5486
# Adrian Alonso <aalonso00@gmail.com>
# Fix stop demon

# Source functions library
source /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

RET=0
PROG=”jtagd”
PID_FILE=/var/run/jtagd.pid
JTAGD=/opt/altera9.0/quartus/bin/jtagd

start ()
{
echo -n $”Starting $PROG sever:”
$JTAGD && success || failure
RET=$?
pidofproc $PROG >> $PID_FILE
echo
}

stop ()
{
local pid
pidfileofproc $JTAG >> pid
if [ -n $pid]; then
echo -n $”Stopping $PROG server”
killproc $JTAGD
else
failure $”Stooping $PROG”
fi
echo
}

case “$1″ in
start)
start
;;
stop)
stop
;;
restart)
stop
start
;;
*)
echo $”Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}”
RET=1
esac

exit $RET
————————————————————————————————–

10. Start the Jtag server by

<script-name.sh> start

11. Create a jtag config file

touch /home/<user>/.jtag.conf

Yes, the file is empty, when launching the programmer from Quartus IDE it only checks if this file exits.

12. From Quartus II launch the programmer and select the device “usb-blaster” to be able to download your design.

13. SOPC builder fix

When I try to start the SOPC builder I just saw an splash screen and nothing happened, looking at the run time log files “sopc_builder_log.txt” (is placed on your main project directory), libXtst library is missing so just installing it will solve the problem.

su -c “yum install libXtst.i586″

14. Working with NIOS IDE

Install dependency libraries

su -c “yum install gtk2.i586 libcanberra-gtk2.i586″

Create a script named nios2.sh and add the following lines (Make the proper changes)
————————————————————————————————–
#!/bin/bash
# User specific aliases and functions
export QUARTUS_64BIT=1
QUARTUS_BASE=/opt/altera9.0
export QUARTUS_ROOTDIR=$QUARTUS_BASE/quartus
export SOPC_KIT_NIOS2=$QUARTUS_BASE/nios2eds
export SOPC_BUILDER_PATH=$QUARTUS_BASE/nios2eds
unset GCC_EXEC_PREFIX
export PERL5LIB=/usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0
bash –rcfile $QUARTUS_ROOTDIR/sopc_builder/bin/nios_bash
————————————————————————————————–
Running the script will set the shell with all the environment variables needed to use the nios2 ide.

Start nios2-ide from the shell

nios2-ide

There should be  a better way to wrap around 64bit libraries and avoid to install 32bit libraries to work with Quartus II.