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Quartus II 13.1. + Debian Linux

Since about Debian/Linux 11 and above, Intel/Altera Quartus 13.1 has stopped working. It is true that it is already somewhat outdated, but if you still have an FPGA Cyclone III and lower in use somewhere, there is no other tool available.

As such, the application seemingly works, but is unable to perform synthesis of more complex VHDL designs (say 5000 LE and above). I have not been able to find out where exactly the problem is, but it seems to go very deep down to somewhere at the libc level.

So how to run Quartus II on the new Debian ?

  • Windows virtualization e.g. in VirtualBox
    • Huge overkill in terms of system resources used
    • Complicated data sharing
  • Wine + Windows version of Quartus II
    • Significantly less resource intensive
    • Slightly complicated data sharing – different path naming in Wine and Linux
    • Can block USB blaster if it terminates incorrectly and even correctly, because jtagservd.exe will still run.
  • Chroot + native Quartus II
    • Native Linux application
    • Takes up more disk space than Wine
    • More complicated to run – chroot requires admin rights but proot solves this problem.

The first option is quite inappropriate, the second is straightforward and probably needs no comment, so I’ll only comment on the third one here.

Chroot + Quartus II

The trick with this approach is very simple, just install an older version of Debian/Linux, e.g. 10 (see https://wiki.debian.org/chroot) in chroot and install Quartus II into it.

Then use proot to run quartus, for example as follows:

proot -R /path/to/chroot -b /path/to/dir/be/accessible/from/chroot:/another/such/dir /path/to/quartus/bin/quartus –64bit

GitHub repository

A new GitHub repository – see https://github.com/zmatkar

Speed controller for two DC motors

Added page with information about DC motor driver. See http://zmatkar.k25.cz/?page_id=576&lang=en.

KtikZ patch of line highlighting

The KtikZ lacks option to change current line highlight color. This is anoying especially when dark theme is used.

This patch solve this, it allows user to change line highlight color: linehighlight.patch

Source code of KtikZ can be downloaded from https://github.com/maxmeyer/qtikz-svn

Eclipse and MSP430

Due to the fact that TI has still no support for the MSP430 Launchpad on Linux version of Code Composer Studio, I looked on the internet for a simple way how to get to work Launchpad on Linux.
An excellent solution can be found at http://xpg.dk/projects/msp430/msp430-eclipse/
It works out-of-the-box, just make sure you have not a .mspdebug in the home directory,  that overrides settings of mspdebug and then it does not work as expected.

Helper script for creating KiCad components

I need to add to KiCad some high pin count components (FPGA devices). (Continued)

SimpleDSO is now on Sourceforge

I created the SimpleDSO project on sourceforge, it is possible to contribute to SimpleDSO source via Subversion.
Project can be found at this link.

SimpleDSO version 0.3 for UNI-T DSOs

I finished some updates of SimpleDSO program. Support for range information was added – see screenshot below.

SimpleDSO v0.3

Download is here. Zip file is exe for Windows, tar.gz file is pure python script usefull under Linux.
Full support is available only for Linux !

Windows version of program for UNI-T DSO

Yesterday I finally compiled simpleDSO and dso_qt4 to exe files for simple use in windows.
Download is available here.

New version of UNI-T software available

On this link you can find new version of UNI-T DSO software – simpleDSO.