UWE Bristol Engineering showcase 2015

Rhys David
Beng Electronic Engineering
Project Supervisor: Nigel Gunton
An Investigation Into the use of Open Source Alternatives for the Altera
NEEK (Nios II Embedded Evaluation Kit)
The Altera NEEK is an FPGA-based, touch screen development board which is
full of great hardware specs and peripherals. However, the intended
operation of the device uses an closed-standard app-based GUI, whereby the
designer is able to produce a range of different specific-use apps with
Altera’s Quartus II software, to be stored in a connected SD card, which the
GUI displays when the device is powered on. The App Selector GUI is not
editable or configurable to the user, and leaves the functions and usefulness
of the device limited.
The main goal of this investigation was to find and implement an open
source, alternative operating system for the NEEK, in the process removing
the closed standards which hold it back.
The two big focuses of the investigation were the advantages of open source
software, and also the flexibility and power of FPGAs.
The big difference separating the NEEK from popularised hobby project
micro-computers such as the raspberry pi, is that the NEEK is built around a
Cyclone III FPGA. This makes the device far more flexible in its uses, as the
actual hardware of the device can be manipulated for different tasks.
Of the many open source options out there, uCLinux was chosen to be
installed onto the device. uCLinux is a commonly used, stripped-down
version of the Linux 2.0 kernel, which was designed originally for micro
controllers, but its small footprint and wide range of compatible porting
options makes it a popular choice in many projects.
The operating system was implemented by using an openly available
hardware build as the default, and using U-Boot (a board-specific
configurable bootloader for operating systems) for configuring the flash
environment, and for downloading binaries via TFTP (Trivial File Transfer
Protocol) to also be stored in flash.
At boot, a converted .rbf (raw binary file) of the .sof hardware build is loaded
from flash to configure the FPGA. Then, uCLinux boots from flash. uCLinux
has so far been configured to run a few commands on its own at boot,
including running a touch screen configuration utility, and a basic graphical
user interface, with a terminal window.
In the future, it is hoped that this project can be taken further, to configure
uCLinux to be able to control the hardware on the FPGA for any tasks it
requires, e.g. extra processing power if a task is especially challenging, or
logic blocks if required.
Project Summary
An investigation has been made into potential open
source alternatives for Altera’s touch screen, FPGAbased
development board: the Nios II Embedded
Evaluation Kit, and the closed standards implemented
as default on the device.
Project Objectives
• To find and integrate, or implement from scratch, a
hardware design for an open source operating
system.
• To install an open source operating system onto
the device.
• To explore the potential of an FPGA device being
controlled by Linux
Project Conclusion
An open source alternative for the Altera NEEK has
been found and implemented, in the form of uCLinux,
a scaled down version of Linux based on the 2.0
kernel. From the implementation, the following
conclusions may be drawn.
• The NEEK proves as a stable base for Linux to work
with, and the two seem to work very well together.
• Although a version of U-Boot was not found that
included the necessary configuration files for the
NEEK, adding board configurations is not an overly
complicated procedure, and once the files were
added and errors solved, u-boot seemed to work
well for allowing the board to load the hardware,
and then uCLinux, with plenty of options for
configuring further, if need be.
• By simply editing the way in which uCLinux boots,
it was shown how flexible Linux is as a platform,
and how easily configurable its file system is,
proving it was a good candidate for the alternative
to Altera’s standards.