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Open Source Resources for Nova Engineering's Constellation-10KE(tm) Development Board

Nova Engineering's Constellation-10KE(tm) is a FPGA development board with USB and ISA connectivity. Nova already provides Windows drivers and a ISA driver for Linux. This project currently consists in a Linux driver for USB operation, as well as a C++ user library portable to Linux and Windows.

These tools were written by Vincent Levesque as part of research project at McGill University starting in 2003. They were initially released publicly in May 2005. Vincent Levesque is not affiliated with Nova Engineering.

sidus-drv

 Linux driver (USB only)

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This "driver" consists in a set of scripts for Linux's USB hotplugging subsystem as well as the Constellation board's EZ-USB binary firmware file. Once installed, these scripts automatically upload the firmware to the device upon connection. The device can then be used through USBFS with the libsidus library.

prerequisites:

  1. kernel > 2.6.8.1: The EZUSB firmware uploaded to the device doesn't respond correctly to USB identification requests. It seems that kernel versions greater than 2.6.8.1 ignore the error while older versions reject the device.
  2. fxload: fxload is a program that uploads firmware to EZ-USB chips.

License: Public Domain. The firmware is the property of Nova Engineering and redistributed here with permission.


libsidus

 C++ user library (Linux/Win32)

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This user library provides a set of C++ classes for interaction with the Constellation board by USB. It works both on Linux (using sidus-dr) and on Windows (using Nova's driver).

License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LPGL).


sidus-gui

 basic GTK user interface to Constellation board

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This application provides a basic graphical user interface to interact with the Constellation board. Requires gtkmm 2.4.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL).