Altera Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit - Manual (Page 15)

Altera Corporation Core Version a.b.c variable 3–1
July 2010 Preliminary
3. Using the Control Panel
Overview The control panel consists of the following:
■ The graphical user interface (GUI) application on the host computer
■ The standard Nios II hardware design running on the board's
Cyclone III FPGA device
After installing the Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit, you can locate the
control panel for the hardware and software in the
<kit path>\demos\control_panel directory.
The design downloaded to the Cyclone III device implements a
command controller that processes board commands sent over the
USB-Blaster from the control panel. To perform the appropriate actions,
the command controller communicates with the controller of the targeted
board I/O device.
You can perform the following actions with the control panel:
■ Light up LEDs
■ Detect push button presses
■ Read from and write to the DDR SDRAM, SRAM, flash memory, and
on-chip RAM
The following sections describe how to perform the above actions with
the control panel already open on the host computer. If not already open,
launch the control panel as described in
“Control Panel Start” .
Control Panel
Start The Cyclone III development board is shipped with an example design
stored in the flash memory which configures the Cyclone III FPGA upon
power-up with the standard Nios II design.
1 For an older version of the Cyclone III development board
shipped with the Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit v7.1.0, v7.2.0, or
8.0.0 application, you must manually configure the
cycloneIII_3c25_start_niosII_standard.sof
into the FPGA
before launching the control panel application.