shorne in japan

Today I got my DE0-Nano FPGA development board. The first thing I wanted to do was get the linux connectivity setup; so I plugged it in. The device was recognized as character devide by linux right away.

Next, I checked Altera to see if anything special was needed for getting USB-Blaster setup in linux. They recommend some udev example rules to make the device file world writable, I guess that is ok. I dropped the udev rules into /etc/udev/rules.d/51-usbblaster.rules and unplugged then replugged the device but nothing happened.

I havent setup udev rules for a while, so right away I wasn’t able to spot the problem. I was able to test the rules using udevadm as below.

    udevadm test /bus/usb/devices/3-1

It complained that BUS and SYSFS matchers were not valid. They were removed in 2011 according to the udev changelog.

Using udevadm we are also able to see the proper attributes that we should be matching. Below is what I have come up with to properly setup USB-Blaster in linux. I am using Fedora 18.

    udevadm info -a --path=/sys/bus/usb/devices/3-1

My USB-Blaster udev Rules

    # USB-Blaster
    SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6001", MODE="0666", SYMLINK="usbblaster%n"
    SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6002", MODE="0666"
    SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6003", MODE="0666"
    #
    # # USB-Blaster II
    SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6010", MODE="0666"
    SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6810", MODE="0666"

Note, since my device is a 6001 I setup a symlink which will make it easily accessable at /dev/usbblaster1.

Hopefully this will be helpful to other people.