10
Chapter 2
DE2i-150 Control Panel
The DE2i-150 board comes with a Control Panel program that allows users to access various
components on the board from a host computer. The host computer communicates with the board
through a USB connection. The program can be used to verify the functionality of components on
the board or be used as a debug tool while developing RTL code.
This chapter first presents some basic functions of the Control Panel, then describes its structure in
the block diagram form, and finally describes its capabilities.
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The Control Panel Software Utility is located in the directory
“
Tools/
ControlPanel
”
in the
DE2i-150
System CD
. It's free of installation, just copy the whole folder to your host computer and launch the
control panel by executing the “
DE2i_150_ControlPanel.exe
”.
Specific control circuits should be downloaded to your FPGA board before the control panel can
request it to perform required tasks. The program will call Quartus II tools to download the control
circuit to the FPGA board through the USB-Blaster[USB-0] connection.
To activate the Control Panel, perform the following steps:
1.
Make sure Quartus II 12.1 or later version is installed successfully on your PC.
2.
Set the RUN/PROG switch to the RUN position.
3.
Connect the supplied USB cable to the USB Blaster port, connect the 12V power supply, and
turn the power switch ON.
4.
Start the executable DE2i_150_ControlPanel.exe on the host computer. The Control Panel user
interface shown in
will appear.
5.
The DE2i_150_ControlPanel.sof bit stream is loaded automatically as soon as the
DE2i_150_control_panel.exe is launched.