cycloneV-serial-flasher

A shell implementation of a bypass system to flash the FPGA on an Altera DE1-SoC running linux through its ttyUSB interface.

Dependencies

On the source:

• screen: if you wanna monitor the upload process, as it can take quite a long time. Know that it will cancel the last session of screen in the hope of getting access to the tty, this was not tested without screen installed.
• echo
• printf
• cat
• awk
• base64
• md5sum
• dmesg
• grep
• gzip (with gunzip)

On the target:

• sh
• echo
• md5sum
• awk
• printf
• gzip (with gunzip)
• base64
• dd
• A reliable way to flash the FPGA

Use

./flashfpga.sh <raw binary file>

Use Case

In case your version of quartus does not detect the USB-Blaster interface, and you need a way to flash the FPGA without removing the SD-card from the SoC, this is the right tool for you!

BackGround

In my case, I needed for a project to use quartus version 17 on my machine, I already had version 19 working on my machine but some custom IPs could not be upgraded between the 2 versions. I did however have access to documentation on how the SoC could flash the FPGA on boot on a specific version of linux (see http://csys.yonsei.ac.kr/lect/embed/Linux-DE1-SoC.pdf 2.2 & page 32 for more info).

Notes

With some tweaking you can actually send any file to the target. See it as a "hacky" cp over ttyUSB.
This is a very hacky implementation but it does the job for my use-case. Here is a link to the related StackExchange thread: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/548205/copy-a-file-over-serial-connection/