What can I do with what I already have

[prophoss]

I already know I need a better dev board with a newer fpga, but being kind of expensive that will have to wait.  What I have is a cheap Chinese dev board with a lot of peripherals and a cyclone IV fpga. The actual details of what the dev board can do is abit sketchy.  There are buttons, LEDs, looks like a rs232 port, dip switch,  and maybe a few other things I don't know what they are. What can  I do with this board to learn as I save for a better more specific peripherals type board? I'll try and provide pictures later if they are desired.  Thanks ahead of time,  B K Cooper

[CatalinaWOW]

Think of something you want to automate.  Nothing too simple or too complex.  But say, if there are no lights on in the room, turn one on, but if there are already lights on, don't change anything.  Or, turn the fan off a minute after the heater power turns off.  Use the switches and LEDs as surrogates for the real things.   Once you figure out how to do simple functions like that your imagination will be triggered to come up with more complex, and possibly more impactful scenarios.


You can go many ways at this point.  Put it to work with the real application.  Figure out how to accomplish your bigger ideas with the resources at hand.  Or figure the minimum added I/O devices required to implement.  Or use your better knowledge of what you want and what it takes to do it to select your next development platform.

[Bud]

Dev boards are dummy pieces of equipment. What they have is processors and/or FPGAs glued with interfaces peripherals. It is Your job as a developer to write code that makes the board do something.

[prophoss]

I should have explained better. I'm trying to figure out what if any extras, like code for rs232, is built into the cyclone IV. For instance the artsy s7 dev board using a spartan 7 fpga has a built in adc, quad spi, and a few other things that are ready for interface out of the box. It seems more like the  cyclone 4 is just a bunch of gates that you can use. With nothing baked in.

[CatalinaWOW]

I am sure you are right about it just being a set of gates, not preprogrammed with any major logic blocks.  Some low cost dev boards I found did come with a blinky program.   

The real key is finding free HDL logic blocks you can use.  Did your board come with a CD, DVD or link to a website?  Does it come with an attached IDE?  Have you looked for open source or free IDEs that may be available. For example Intel has its Quartus Prime which may work with your board. 

If this is your first step into electronics it appears you have chosen a pretty deep part of the pool to dip your toes into.  There is enough room in the Cyclone to do some pretty impressive DSP or implement a modest calculator, even a modest microcomputer.

[prophoss]

Actually no it's not my first go here. I use quartis 2 for the ide/synthesizing. It does actually come with some demo code but haven't really taken a look at all of the it. It took me a while to find all the files that go with the dev board and I'm not sure how much of it is correct or current for this board.  That's why I was reaching out to see if anybody had a better idea of what could be done with this  fpga. I've done a lot of simple stuff with LEDs and the dip switch or buttons.  I'm wanting to go deeper, even into communication using uart and rs232. I took some classes back in college for digital design and loved it. That's when I bought this board, a couple of years ago,  but had stop playing with it because I had to  focus on my other classes.  Now I have some free time and want to dive back in.

[S. Petrukhin]

Once you build a TCP/IP stack on an FPGA, your level of knowledge will be worth millions. 

[bidrohini1]

If you're not already familiar, start learning VHDL or Verilog, the hardware description languages commonly used for FPGA programming. You can try to make a gaming console. Here is a design of a gaming console. https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/arduFPGA_V1_0_game_console.html

[Jwillis]

I already know I need a better dev board with a newer fpga, but being kind of expensive that will have to wait.  What I have is a cheap Chinese dev board with a lot of peripherals and a cyclone IV fpga. The actual details of what the dev board can do is abit sketchy.  There are buttons, LEDs, looks like a rs232 port, dip switch,  and maybe a few other things I don't know what they are. What can  I do with this board to learn as I save for a better more specific peripherals type board? I'll try and provide pictures later if they are desired.  Thanks ahead of time,  B K Cooper

   

Did you check out Github. Theirs a few things there for the DE0-nano board. Your cyclone IV wouldn't be the Terasic P0082 or similar would it?

[prophoss]

Unfortunately no it's not a terasic dev board.  However, that's not a bad idea. I'll have check out their github for that. I was looking for a mew dev board and realized the Deo-nano used a cyclone 4. That got me to looking around at what that fpga might be able to do. Thanks!