Cyclone V SoCKit - Software / processor

[CM800]

Righto!

So, I've managed to get my grubby little hands on a Cyclone V SoCKit. I've went through the SoC Hardware Lab 13.1...

I've came to realise I'm way out of depth already... but I managed to get through and complete that side of things.


Now, I've went over to the SoC Software Lab 13.1...

They use ARM DS-5 and  SoC EDS if I'm understanding this right...

I'm a little concerned at this as they don't seem to offer a lite / free option.... Has anyone had experience with this situation?

I've already busted my wallet on £160 of dev kit... no way I can afford multi-thousands for software.


I am determined to continue and get this going! Even if I'm realising how misguided I was to this being a simpler development platform then designing my own PCB with a MAX 10 & STM32F4 on it.... I haven't even touched Linux or more powerful processors let alone a Duel core A9.... Any recommendations on what I should be doing / reading would be ----Great!----


Oh, Also, heres the resources I'm using: https://rocketboards.org/foswiki/view/Documentation/ArrowSoCKitEvaluationBoard#Reference_Designs

[andersm]

I'm a little concerned at this as they don't seem to offer a lite / free option.... Has anyone had experience with this situation?

There's a free DS-5 Community Edition, but it's limited to developing Linux applications.

How do you want to use the board? If you want to run Linux, all you really need SoC EDS for is to generate and build the preloader. The rest is just normal embedded Linux development, for which there's a ton if different ways (eg. Yocto, Buildroot, PTXdist and so on). All of the HPS peripherals, and most of Altera's standard soft peripherals are supported in the vanilla Linux kernel, so you're better off going with something well-supported by the Linux community rather than whatever Altera are offering.

[CM800]

I'm a little concerned at this as they don't seem to offer a lite / free option.... Has anyone had experience with this situation?

There's a free DS-5 Community Edition, but it's limited to developing Linux applications.

How do you want to use the board? If you want to run Linux, all you really need SoC EDS for is to generate and build the preloader. The rest is just normal embedded Linux development, for which there's a ton if different ways (eg. Yocto, Buildroot, PTXdist and so on). All of the HPS peripherals, and most of Altera's standard soft peripherals are supported in the vanilla Linux kernel, so you're better off going with something well-supported by the Linux community rather than whatever Altera are offering.

Not too sure, I have no familiarity with Linux,

I kind of liked the idea of running bare-bones on the processor. I feel it would be easier to understand / learn with just bare-bones.

Maybe later on I'd like to toy with Linux on one core and a RealTime processor on the other.

I don't really have any experiances with RTOSes etc. I generally have done more work on Arduinos, though I still have a firm understanding of peripherals, logic etc. (been touching on DMA recently)