Cool Project, Stuck for a Moment

Monday, was spent trying to decide how to move forward. I had sort of hit that point where you wonder if you are on the right track. Everything starts to look formidable. Yes I have made a lot of progress and learned some new  skills already. But, the LN2 wiki is a few years old and references older versions of the Altera software. Some of the issues I have already run into and solved have had to do with outdated references and issues with compatibility.  I suspect the binary counter issue with the bad elf was part of that.

The instructions and references on the wiki are less detailed and seem to presume more prior knowledge than I have. All wikis are living documents. They are edited by a community and by definition are never finished. They are supposed to be continually edited as the information it records also evolves. However, when a wiki is no longer actively being edited it is still not finished and generally contains inconsistent, outdated and often incoherent information. Instead of a living document it becomes a wiki-zombie which stumbles around its old familiar places. You can observe it and possibly extract where it should be but unless you are part of the community you don’t know if it is the living dead because the information it documents has become irrelevant or the information it documents is so stable that editing the wiki has become irrelevant. So, do I search for another free embedded Linux source or do I presume that this the best one and continue forward.

I am still not completely comfortable with understanding the entirety of the BSP. I understand what it probably does but I am not ready to solve issues like the one I ran into with the binary counter template. So, should I spend more time on the software guide? Possibly move forward with some non-Linux software development within Eclipse before I go back to the LN2 wiki. Or, should I barge forward with the LN2 wiki and expect that I don’t need to know anymore about BSP? Maybe, I should start building some of the other hardware for the final project. This would get me back to an area I am already comfortable with and restore my confidence. In fact, I could give up on the Linux effort and just build the project on the NIOS II I already built and launch from one of the Eclipse software templates.

That was Monday.

Cool Project or Bust?

While I am between clients I have decided to start a learning project
to keep my skills honed and to add new experience to my portfolio. I
had to invent a project that would hopefully keep my interest and even
be sustainable once my next client engagement begins. Since I have an
interest in electric guitars I decided to attempt to make a guitar
effects project using an Altera Development board I have with a nice
large Stratix II FPGA and some audio ADC/DAC capability.

The new skills I chose to pursue are adding a NIOS processor to an
FPGA project and to load and launch an embedded application on
embedded Linux. This whole project is actually quite a bit of work and
alot of new technology. Rather than starting from scratch I hoped I
could not find some existing work to leverage. Blogging about this
project real-time is also a big risk since if I get too bogged down
and quit or get too busy with a new client and languish it could be
embarassing. However, if I don’t blog it while I am doing it, it won’t
get written. So I am taking the chance. I know sometimes it is nice to
read about failures but I would rather you read about someone else.

My first find was an interesting project at teamovercrest.org. They
have a completed guitar effects project targeting an Altera FPGA DE
Board and a NIOS processor. The effects are all in parallel hardware
and the processor takes care of comminications and the UI. All I need
to do is retarget to my DE Board and port to NIOS with embedded
Linux. Then I can add my own ideas in Verilog for the effects and the
GUI in C. How long do you think that should take?

I decided my first step is to get familiar with NIOS and embedded
Linux and found everything I think I need to know at

http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/Linux.

The first thing I discovered is that I need a Linux desktop for
compiling the embedded Linux. I have two XP machines and although I
could pull an old x86 machine from my attic I decided to go the VMware
route.

I installed VMware and although the wiki recommended a Centos5 or a
Fedora install they wanted to install from a burned disk and not an
ISO image. It appeared that VMware and I both like Ubuntu so I tried
that rather than fight those battles. By the way, if you haven’t run
Ubuntu in a long while, as I haven’t, ctl-alt-t gets you a terminal. I
installed as many of the recommended extra apps from the Altera Wiki
as I could easily find and started downloading the NIOS linux project
and the embedded linux distribution files.

With the long downloads and some interruptions all of the above killed
an afternoon so let’s see what happens next week.