[hpsdr] Programming assistance required

[Phil Harman]

One of the nice features that Phil, N8VB, provided when he designed the 
Atlas bus and Ozy board was the ability to JTAG program other devices on the 
bus.  Phil's  idea was to daisy chain the JTAG along the bus so that the 
FPGA or Flash memory on each board could be independantly updated.

With the release of Penelope we are starting to see requests for changes and 
enhancements to the FPGA code.
There are a number of ways we can update the code;

1.Use an Altera USB Blaster or  Altera Byte Blaster (original, clone or home 
brew) connected directly to the Penelope board

2. Program the FX2 on Ozy to emulate an Altera USB Blaster and program 
Penelope via the Atlas JTAG chain

Ramakrishnan, VU3RDD, and Bill, KD5TFD, have developed the required code to 
load into the FX2 on Ozy and I've added some Ozy FPGA code that connects the 
required FX2 pins to the JTAG bus.  We have tested it and it works just 
fine.

There are a number of choices as to how we load the required code into our 
FX2 Byte Blaser emulator.

a. Use the free Altera  Quartus program - a 400MB down load, 1GB when 
installed that requires a free on line licence to be periodically renewed, 
then lean how to use it

b. Use the free Altera JTAG programing software - about 70MB when 
installed - then learn how to use it

c. Write a (hopefully) simple PC program that will automate and simplify the 
task. (NOTE: such a program,or one we could use as a starting point,  may 
already exist - some Googling required!)

It's this last option that we are looking for a volunteer to tackle.  The 
source of the FX2 Byte Blaster emulation code is open source as is some PC 
code from Altera called JRunner. Hopefully these two items of code is all 
that is needed to develop our own PC programming software.

You will get plenty of support and encouragement from Ramakrishnan, Bill and 
myself - so.... anyone interested in this project please?

73's Phil....VK6APH




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