Atlas SoC

Purchase

One problem with buying an FPGA card from ebay is that it is difficult to find appropriate tutorials which are designed for similar configurations.  I regularly see tutorials for Altera development boards but initially I thought the boards were all terribly expensive.  However when I saw the Atlas-SoC board for about £100 at Mouser I had to buy one.  It comes as a specific learning package, it is based on a cyclone V, has an ethernet port, and runs linux from an SD-Card.  That seems like nirvana and without a trace of indecisiveness I sent off for one.

Getting Started

The board arrives with some instructions (a pleasant novelty) and when I plug the micro-USB connector in to the PC and power it up I see a new F: drive!  This tells me to install a driver  then I can open a browser session to the board!  I did have a little bit of faffing about to get the driver to work, perhaps because the package was put together in 2015, but soon I had a welcome screen on the FPGA IP address.  A wonderful start to the experience!

The board comes in two flavours:
Atlas-SoC - targetted at Embedded software developers
DE0-Nano-SoC - targetted at Hardware developers

Both have exactly the same hardware but the getting started instructions are different.

Having followed the "software" instructions initially I wanted to understand a little bit about the hardware so followed the DE0-Nano-SoC Getting started guide.  This took me through 5 steps:

1 Add Cyclone V device support to Quartus (I previously had Cyclone IV and MAX1000)
2 Install SoC FPGA EDS (Embedded Development Suite)
3 Setup the board, including configuration switches
4 FPGA System Test - use Quartus to load and run an LED counter sketch
5 Run Linux on the board - format an SD card for linux, boot up and connect via Putty.

This provided an even more wonderful experience.  We are now able to program the FPGA part of the board and have Linux running on the HPS (Hardware Processor System) part.