Re: Official Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner (Smaller Devices Now Supported!)
Damn, that's just about the worst case. There are only two means of accessing this FPGA:
- Ethernet (not exactly trivial on the FPGA side, but in theory this board could mine standalone!)
- A built-in USB blaster (USB to JTAG bridge), which cannot easily be accessed from anything else than the Altera tools.
- Ethernet (not exactly trivial on the FPGA side, but in theory this board could mine standalone!)
- A built-in USB blaster (USB to JTAG bridge), which cannot easily be accessed from anything else than the Altera tools.
Hm, there is a FPGA communication package that 'speaks' UDP on opencores that could be used. Of course the can be some packets missing, since UDP has no provision for package loss ( i would use a sequence number an send a nonce multiple times ...
The other was would be the jtag solution, there is an advance debug system on opencores that uses jtag, as far i understand the docs, it does not require Altera software, but i think it needs some more effort to get it running. I did not dug into, as i am a fan of the serial solution but on the other hand, i still looking for transfering the jtag-communication to an arm system so i could power off my PC at night (given there are no compilation task pending)
The problem with the JTAG solution is that you need to have a way to access the JTAG interface in the first place. And IIRC communicating with those blasters is a PITA.
UDP might make more sense, but I've never dealt with that so far.
Hooking up some level shifters to one of those gigabit transceivers and driving RS232 on them might be another possibility
