This week Grace and I worked on understanding how to actually work with the Nios II Processor a bit. Because we were waiting to receive the USB-ethernet dongle, so we could more easily work with the ethernet ports, we were set back from originally working together Monday evening. On Wednesday, Grace and I sat down to try to follow the basic ethernet web-server demo that comes with the board. Unfortunately, we were 1) missing a gateway (which we didn’t realize we needed for the demo), and 2) missing a file which we think we needed to run the demo. However, we did play around with the Nios II SOPC builder a bit more this week, so we/I have a better understanding of how the processor actually works and how to build it. I also looked into the Nios II terminal which we can use to send data to the board via the ethernet connection. We have to do a little bit more research to understand if there is a way we can interface with the terminal, but at the very least, we know that we should be able to execute some sort of script that can execute the code within a test. Additionally, I spent a decent portion of time trying to reinstall quartus on my laptop, so that I can play around with ethernet from my computer. (It turns out that since Altera does not sign their drivers, and I have windows 11, it was difficult to figure out how to get around that issue)
I was hoping we would be able to run an actual test this week using the ethernet cable, but we spent a lot of time still digging up papers and resources to better understand how we will interface with it. I found a paper which interfaces ethernet (via the Nios II processor) with other code, so I feel like I have a better understanding of how we can utilize the processor and utilize our DUT at the same time. I think Grace and I are a little more behind than we wanted to be, but we’re aiming to spend a lot of time together Monday evening/maybe Wednesday figuring out a large portion of the ethernet and getting a simple test working. Next week, I’m planning on spending a lot of time making sure we can get ethernet working and helping out with the design report.