DE10-Lite
User Manual
8
www.terasic.com
May 11, 2018
Chapter 2
Control Panel
The DE10-Lite 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 any 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
DE10-Lite System CD
. It's free of installation, just copy the whole folder to your host computer
and launch the control panel by executing the “DE10_Lite_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 16.0 or a later version is installed successfully on your PC.
2. Connect the USB cable provided to the USB Blaster port.
3. Start the executable
DE10_Lite_ControlPanel.exe
on the host computer. The Control Panel user
interface shown in
Figure 2-1
will appear.
4. The DE10_Lite_ControlPanel.sof bit stream is loaded automatically as soon as the
DE10_Lite_ControlPanel.exe
is launched.
5. In case of a disconnection, click on CONNECT where the .sof will be re-loaded onto the board.
Please note that the Control Panel will occupy the USB port until you close that port; you cannot use
Quartus II to download a configuration file into the FPGA until the USB port is closed.