Setting up BeMicro Cyclone III development Board

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, 

 I'm trying to run a basic application using my BeMicro Cyclone III development board.  But I've got some errors when I'm trying to set up my SOPC, using SOPC builder tool (Quartus > Tools > SOPC builder...). The first one is the following, which appears when I add an ext_ram_16 peripheric : Error: set_module_property: INTERNAL not allowed for EModuleProperty, must be in {[DESCRIPTION, NAME, VERSION, MODULE_TCL_FILE, MODULE_DIRECTORY, GROUP, AUTHOR, ICON_PATH, DISPLAY_NAME, LIBRARIES, DATASHEET_URL, TOP_LEVEL_HDL_FILE, TOP_LEVEL_HDL_MODULE, INSTANTIATE_IN_SYSTEM_MODULE, EDITABLE, VALIDATION_CALLBACK, EDITOR_CALLBACK, GENERATION_CALLBACK, ELABORATION_CALLBACK]}  I've got a bench of errors like that (see Attachments).  Thank for your help.  Julien

[Altera_Forum]

That is a very pretty window manager ... which OS are you running? 

 Jake

[Altera_Forum]

I'm running 64-bit windows 7. I already fixed the issue with the driver compatibility.

[Altera_Forum]

I've downloaded the Getting Started files from http://www.arrownac.com/offers/altera-corporation/bemicro/getting-started.html 

 I'm following step by step but it is not working, I have the issues I've told about previously. So I'm downloading the 9.0 version of Quartus, to replace mine which is the 8.1 version. I don't know if it is the reason of my problem.  Somebody have a solution ?

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, 

 works for me using Quartus 9.1 and Windows 7 / 32 bits. I used project for version 9.x (.\bemicro\designs\NIOS\bemicro_example_nios_01_90)  Regards.

[Altera_Forum]

To my knowledge both 64-bit Vista and Windows 7 are unsupported. 

 This is a typical difference between software and hardware engineers. Software engineers will typically have the latest and greatest or even experimental OS on their machines. They'll spend hours on end trying to get unsupported apps to work on unsupported OS's just for the fun of it. IT people tend to fall into this category as well.  To the typical hardware engineer, the OS has only one purpose and that is to support the applications. It just has to work. The hardware engineer will typically be years behind and reluctant to change.  So the recommendation ... if you're just having some fun, carry on and let us know how and when you get it working. If you really want to use the tools, switch back to a supported OS until the rest of the world catches up with your ambitions.  :) Jake

[Altera_Forum]

Thanks guy, you're right. For the moment, I don't have so much time to look for a solution, so I've installed 32-bit version of windows 7. Now, it's working great ! 

 Thank you very much everybody.  Julien

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  I'm running 64-bit windows 7. I already fixed the issue with the driver compatibility.  --- Quote End ---    Can you please let me know how to get the BeMicro Cyclone iii eval board working on Win 7 64bit which is my new machine (I miss XP Pro).  I would appreciate the help very much,  Thanks,  Dale

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  Can you please let me know how to get the BeMicro Cyclone iii eval board working on Win 7 64bit which is my new machine (I miss XP Pro).  I would appreciate the help very much,  Thanks,  Dale  --- Quote End ---    Scratch that. I gave up on the Win7 64bit machine that IT gave me.   However I am now stuck with xp pro 64 bit , good luck getting 32 bit hardware now. So far all my development applications have installed with the exception that I can not get the USB Blaster driver to install properly which seems to be required to support the BeMicro eval board.  - When I run the setup file under the BeMicro\programmer folder, the install process seems to work to install the jtag_hw_arrow_usb_blaster.dll When I check out drivers under Device Manager I see 2 drivers installed:  - Arrow USB-Blaster Port A  - Arrow USB-Blaster Port B  - However, when I work through the BeMicro tutorial and get to the 5.3 section part where it wants me to click Hardware Setup and select Arrow-USB-Blaster in Quartus (I am using quartus v10 sp1), the only option I see is "No Hardware"    I have to get results rolling fast, can someone help me get past the XP Pro 64 bit USB Blaster driver Quartus v10 recognition issue.  Thank you very much,  Dale

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  Scratch that. I gave up on the Win7 64bit machine that IT gave me.   However I am now stuck with xp pro 64 bit , good luck getting 32 bit hardware now. So far all my development applications have installed with the exception that I can not get the USB Blaster driver to install properly which seems to be required to support the BeMicro eval board.  - When I run the setup file under the BeMicro\programmer folder, the install process seems to work to install the jtag_hw_arrow_usb_blaster.dll When I check out drivers under Device Manager I see 2 drivers installed:  - Arrow USB-Blaster Port A  - Arrow USB-Blaster Port B  - However, when I work through the BeMicro tutorial and get to the 5.3 section part where it wants me to click Hardware Setup and select Arrow-USB-Blaster in Quartus (I am using quartus v10 sp1), the only option I see is "No Hardware"    I have to get results rolling fast, can someone help me get past the XP Pro 64 bit USB Blaster driver Quartus v10 recognition issue.  Thank you very much,  Dale  --- Quote End ---    Same problem here :( Any solution found yet?

[Altera_Forum]

I needed to move to the latest BeMicro II board, it has a driver that supports Win XP Pro 64bit. However I have found the technical support for Altera is limited, I am in the process of moving to Lattice as a backup, as questions are answered too slowly with Altera. The schematic edit part of Quartus is better than Lattice Diamond though, but if you can't get the design working due to lack of support, then it doesn't help much :-)

[Altera_Forum]

Only now I found this thread. I am having the same issues, as I told in this thread: 

http://alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=31590  I tried everything, but I still couldn't setup the new hardware. All I get is "no hardware". Anyone found solutions for this issue?

[Altera_Forum]

I make it working on Windows 7 32 bit machine. However, I had to resolve some quirks first. 

My problem was with simultaneous work of JTAG Altera-Arrow adapter and USB UART located on the same FTDI chip or even on other connected FTDI devices (in my case it was SeaCom RS485 to USB adapter). Every time I tried to use Quartus programmer (GUI or JLI) when other FTDI UARTs where in use by other application it would blue screen my machine. I found that problem was with ftd2xx.dll distributed with BeMicro kit. It's very old version of this dll librarry (dated way back to 2008). It looks like jtag_hw_arrow_usb_blaster.dll wants to use FTDI library which sits directly in the same folder, not one from System32 folder.  I recommend installing latest FTDI driver set and then copy ftd2xx.dll library from System32 folder into Altera folder (replacing older version which came with BeMicro kit). I didn't yet test this solution on Win 7 64 bit platform, but since last batch of FTDI drivers compatible with 64bit system, I think programmer will work as well.