So early last week, I received the coolest thing from a guy at Altera. It’s called the Cubic Cyclonium, and it makes one heck of a paperweight. In essence, it’s a small system designed around an Altera Cyclone FPGA and includes a bunch of cool stuff (168 LED array, 1MB of SRAM, VGA out), all embedded in a block of clear Lexan plastic. It draws power over a USB cable, includes software to program it to do a variety of neat demos (defaults to displaying time and date, can display a scrolling marquee text message, stock quotes, and several games/screensavers including tetris, pong, life, etc). The VGA also sends out a basic Altera video demo (Altera logo, rotating 3D cube consisting of dots, etc). They’ve also included all sorts of documentation and source code for all the demo software/designs. Here’s a little picture from some of the documentation:
Hopefully I’ll get around to taking some better pictures tomorrow including some showing off the LED array. I haven’t yet figured out what cool thing I want to program it to do, but the Cyclone should be able to do all sorts of stuff. From what I understand, I should even be able to get one of their soft core Nios processors to compile onto it and do some interesting stuff with that (although I’m not sure what software I need to do that and if it’s freely available or not).
Hi.
I have this thing too. Done anything cool with it yet?
Do you have a design for this that can be compiled in Quartus?
Honestly, I’ve been pretty busy since I got it. I’m still working on getting my hands on whatever I need to build NIOS-based systems on it, since I will almost certainly find it easier to write something cool in C than in a HDL.
I know they included a fair bit of HDL source on the CD that came with it… I looked at it briefly but didn’t go so far as to actually try to compile and load it, so I don’t know if what they gave me is ready to go out of the box. Would be nice since it would give me a nice platform to extend instead of having to figure out everything from scratch. If you happen to know of any websites out there that discuss the CC (and possibly include some of the things people have done with it), I’d like to hear about them.
Sorry, this seems to be the only place in the web to mention CC. :-/
Haven’t got much time to play around with it either.
Hello Derek,
One of my coworker gave me the Cubic Cyclonium, and I asked Altera for all the documentation but they did not gave me the HDL source. I am sur I don’t have the whole CD to play with the board.
Is it possible for you to send me the HDL design you have?
Thks
Hugues
I did not see it was 2004.. anyway… if rou receive the post, let me know…