Terasic DE0-Nano-SoC board.

[hamster_nz]

For those Altera fans out there, Terasic have just started marketing their DE0-Nano-SoC FPGA devboard.

* Altera Cyclone® V SE 5CSEMA4U23C6N device (FPGA with dual-core ARM CPU)

* 925MHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor

* 1GB DDR3 SDRAM (32-bit data bus)

* 1 Gigabit Ethernet PHY with RJ45 connector

* USB OTG Port, USB Micro-AB connector

* (DRUM ROLL.......) One Arduino expansion header (Uno R3 compatibility)

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=1&No=941&PartNo=2

[Muxr]

Interesting. Any indication of the price? Digikey lists the part alone at $145.

[TopLoser]

$99, $90 academic

[Muxr]

$99, $90 academic

Not bad, thanks.

[miguelvp]

Curses, now I guess I'll have to get one of those and the cute screen as well.

[miguelvp]

Well, I decided to jump in and get it, but Terasic was out of stock, so bullet dodged.

But of course I had to look to see if I could find it locally because shipping from tw is pricey.

Mouser, no dice 48 on order estimated to ship sometime mid August, price $103.75 but not having to pay for the international shipping is not so bad to pay an extra $4.75.

But I did lookup on findchips.com for the part number and Digikey had them on stock, as well as the display

So it's probably going to be around $160 (including the LT241 touch screen module) with shipping and taxes (still waiting for the shipping cost via the cheapest USPS)

The screen was more of an impulse buy since it's only 240x320 64K colors, but I have other Altera dev boards so I can use it without having to use a ton of jumper cables to use my existing display.

Here is the diagram of the dev board:



Edit: DigiKey descriptions, part numbers and prices:

DEV NANO SOC A9 SBC                 P0286-ND        $103.75
MODULE 2.4" LCD TOUCH LT241   P0185-ND          $39.00

Edit: Well, they shipped it, total cost $163.17, shipping was $11.50 and the rest taxes ($8.92).

Edit2: Just checked on the tracking and I'll get both items on Monday!

[bingo600]

Any hints of a decent place to buy one in EU land ?
I mean where it doesn't cost 200+ $

/Bingo

[miguelvp]

I never bought from Terasic directly that I recall, mostly due to about $30 or so shipping.

But ordering directly might make more sense to you, other than they are out of stock at the moment.

I did the initial tests to make sure it can run on FPGA only mode and on FPGA+HPS mode, and connected to the board via the USB-UART connection with PuTTY. The Linux image is already burned into the supplied and installed 4GB class 4 micro SD card. Not sure why they didn't go for a class 10, oh well, doesn't matter much other that takes a while to boot.

Didn't read the instructions if it's ok to just power the device off so I did a "shutdown -h now" just in case and waited until it properly finished.

I can't find the actual source distribution for the kernel, so I might send an e-mail to Terasic support to see if that is available, although it might be just a vanilla install for that processor.

I had a play with the LT24 display and the touch part doesn't sense the screen sides, specially where it's closer to the flex cable. At least 10 percent of the full screen is not usable for touch. Could be a coding error on their demo but I doubt that.

I only played with it for a short time because it arrived on Friday instead of Monday (not sure why since it was a 2nd day priority and usually USPS is pretty good at that).

Also I'm not sure what to think about a spec mismatch, the manual clearly states the HPS (Hard Processor System) is running at 800MHz, while the web page states 925MHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor.

The ADC at 500Ksps might be adequate for nothing really fancy, after all it's 8 channels 12bits with an input range from 0 to 4.096V

I/O seems to be mapped via /dev/mem which is fine, from the FPGA side it's all via the Avalon Memory Mapped interface that Altera uses in Qsys. So pretty much it replaces ARM replaces the NIOS II soft core.

I still have to update my Quartus software since I'm still on version 14.0 instead of the latest and I also need to get the Altera SoC EDS for the C side of development.

So it might take me today to set things up if I can find the time to update and install all that is needed. Also I'm not sure if this dev board will support Altera's OpenCL, I think it might but it's too new and it's not listed.

[bingo600]

I can't find the actual source distribution for the kernel, so I might send an e-mail to Terasic support to see if that is available, although it might be just a vanilla install for that processor.

Could this be it ?

I haven't checkked
http://www.terasic.com/downloads/cd-rom/de0-nano-soc/

[miguelvp]

That's just the image, but maybe it has the source within it.

But I know is a Yocto Linux distribution, I have no need to recompile the kernel yet so it's ok.

Well, a quick google search found this, including Altera's Yocto source and UBoot bootloader:

http://www.rocketboards.org/foswiki/Documentation/AlteraSoCDevelopmentBoardYoctoGettingStarted

Rocketboards website for the DE0-Nano-SoC, or as they call it Atlas-SoC, is not up yet but there is enough information in there.

I guess I'll have to fire up my Ubuntu box that has not been powered up since last year

[miguelvp]

11 pm and I'm still installing things, but I did leave it unattended for big gaps so I guess it was waiting for my input many times.

Almost done and setting up the ARM DS-5 which is part of the Altera SoC EDS Web Edition, the problem is that it keeps popping up driver installation windows for keil and all kind of things, of course they kept on taking the focus of the keyboard but didn't mess it up thankfully.

Then there is the whole setup an Arm developer account, hmm, well maybe I get some time tomorrow to actually do something with the board

[Berni]

That is a pretty nice price for it.

I have an early SocKit board, but its a bit of a pain in the ass with that fancy high speed connector. Mostly got it to check out the new SoC chips before designing a product around one.

The links between the ARM and FPGA are nice, they give you tons of memory bandwidth to everything (Especially the DDR3 controller). But the chip does have strange behavior when you try to access unused memory space. It simply locks up the subsystem that started the memory operation. Not only does it do this on unimplemented FPGA links but also on ARM peripherals that are powered down. Never found a way to make it raise an exception due to this, just sits there locked up until a reset. I guess one could use a watchdog to recover from such a thing, but i like exceptions that hit you in the face with "Hey smartass you screwed this up here"

[Scrts]

That is a pretty nice price for it.

I have an early SocKit board, but its a bit of a pain in the ass with that fancy high speed connector. Mostly got it to check out the new SoC chips before designing a product around one.

The links between the ARM and FPGA are nice, they give you tons of memory bandwidth to everything (Especially the DDR3 controller). But the chip does have strange behavior when you try to access unused memory space. It simply locks up the subsystem that started the memory operation. Not only does it do this on unimplemented FPGA links but also on ARM peripherals that are powered down. Never found a way to make it raise an exception due to this, just sits there locked up until a reset. I guess one could use a watchdog to recover from such a thing, but i like exceptions that hit you in the face with "Hey smartass you screwed this up here"

Is this for segmented memory on hard memory controller? Did you raise a Service Request on this?

[Berni]

Is this for segmented memory on hard memory controller? Did you raise a Service Request on this?

Well it happens with any memory area that's not willing to talk to you. For example when the SPI controller is powered down trying to read or write from any of its registers will lock it up. Usually what SoC chips do in such a case is read some form of garbage from such an address. I meant to ask them about it, but i was too busy figuring out how to use the FPGA bridge (Did some stupid mistakes there). I assumed it normal for that since its typical avalon bus stuck busy behavior. Later i found out it does this for any non operating peripheral.

[plastygrove]

Hi guys - found this thread when trying to find more reviews on the DE0-Nano-SoC board. I was initially considering getting the DE0-Nano but then found this one which seems to be an upgraded version of the other.

I'm a complete noob with FPGAs, but hope to make up my lack of knowledge with persistence .

I like the fact that for the price point this board gives a much better bang for the buck than the papillio, mojo or basys boards. I guess since it's been out for a while and lots of folks have used it, would you consider it a good board to work with given the software stack and development process? Not so much from a beginners point of view, but from a steady state point of view i.e. after I've learnt a bit, will I be able to do a fair number of projects with this board or will I feel the need to upgrade very soon?

Thanks!
PG