Hello everyone! Welcome to another one of my blogs.

I got an FPGA! More specifically, a cyclone 10 LP off of aliexpress. While it is nowhere near the top of the line, not even when it was new, FPGA's are notoriously expensive. If I wanted to get a powerful one, while the hardware is actually not that expensive(an Arria 10 PCIe card is worth about 150 bucks on ebay these days), it requires a 3000$ a year subscibtion in order to program it, and you need an LLC just to buy it, which is actually the reason these powerful FPGA's are so cheap, and while you can certainly get a pirated version of the software on websites like rutracker, they're either full of malware, don't work, or can actually imprint themselves onto the output binary files they produce, and if you publish those, can often harm your chances at a carreer in the future, if you intended to have one.

Next, I had to get a flasher. Unlike many microcontroller based development boards(that commonly run the flasher on the very microcontroller you're flashing the code to), FPGA's do not usually come with a built in flasher of any kind, and as everything related to FPGA's.. you guessed it, they're expensive. In fact, the official one is a whopping 300$. However, almost nobody (atleast in non proffesional settings) uses the official one, and since the 10-pin JTAG interface has been well documented and used since atleast 1990, there are plenty of clones, commonly from 5 to about 70 bucks, and with no past experience with this flasher marker, I decided to go with one of the cheapest ones. While waiting for all the stuff to arrive, I installed Intel Quartus Prime on my computer, and after about half an hour of compilation, it actually finished successfully without breaking my system!

Once it arrived, I connected the JTAG connector to the blaster on one end and the FPGA on the other, plugged in the blaster with the mini-usb (yup, still exists in <insert-current-year-here>) but when I went onto my computer to try and flash it... curiously, nothing was being detected. I wanted to check in more detailed, and after a couple google searches, I figured out that `jtagconfig -n` would list me all the devices. And once I ran that command, I got a "Hardware not attached", however, the blaster itself did show up as being detected. Then, I relaised I might have to power the board. I plugged in the board via usb c, and still, nothing happened. And even after playing around with the buttons on the board and actually turning on the voltage regulators(effectively the power switch), still the good old "Hardware not attached".

At this point, I was a little concerned. I have never really encountered something like this before, that something would just come not working, yet pristine and clearly not destroyed in shipping. After a couple hours of google and using my multimeter(super handy by the way, definetly better than probing via the ADC pins on your Pi Pico) to probe all around the board, it became preety clear that I got ripped off on a sketchy blaster. Turns out these blasters use a microcontroller to simulate the real thing (think arduino trying to emulate a game console), while the legit ones actually use a CPLD (basically a lower power FPGA with on board ROM) to do the job along with actually decent voltage shifters since different FPGA boards run at different voltages, and since my FPGA's reference voltage for flashing was 2.5V, the crappy blaster likely didn't even detect that an FPGA was present, leading to a "No hardware attached" error.

This was honestly the first time I got taken for a ride like this(mostly because I research products before buying for hours), and while I am not happy to now have to spend alot more on a blaster than I would want to on top of the one thats basically a piece o' junk, I feel like its good that it happened with a thing for 5bucks, and not 50 or 500.

Anyways, since this has happened, I have ordered a more legitimate blaster since, and once that arrives, I am sure I will have much more content to share, likely for more than one post, especially with FPGA's being the mindbending thing that they are.

In the meantime, Peace