Fixing Issues With Knockoff Altera USB Blasters

June 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

One exciting feature of hardware development involving MCUs and FPGAs is that you all too often need specific tools to program them, with [Doug Brown] suffering a price tag aneurysm after checking the cost of an official Altera/Intel USB Blaster (yours for $300) to program a MAX 10 FPGA device with. This led him naturally down the path of exploring alternatives, with the $69 Terasic version rejected for ‘being too expensive’ and opting instead for the Waveshare USB Blaster V2, at a regretful $34. The amazing feature of this USB Blaster clone is that while it works perfectly fine under Windows, it works at most intermittently under Linux.

This led [Doug] down the path of reverse-engineering and diagnosing the problem, ultimately throwing in the towel and downclocking the Altera CPLD inside the adapter after finding that it was running a smidge faster than the usual 6 MHz. This was accomplished initially by wiring in an external MCU as a crude (and inaccurate) clock source, but will be replaced with a 12 MHz oscillator later on. Exactly why the problem only exists on Linux and not on Windows will remain a mystery, with Waveshare support also being clueless.

Undeterred, [Doug] then gambled on a $9 USB Blaster clone (pictured above), which turned out to be not only completely non-functional, but also caused an instant BSOD on Windows, presumably due to the faked FTDI USB functionality tripping up the Windows FTDI driver. This got fixed by flashing custom firmware by [Vladimir Duan] to the WCH CH552G-based board after some modifications shared in a project fork. This variety of clone adapters can have a range of MCUs inside, ranging from this WCH one to STM32 and PIC MCUs, with very similar labels on the case. While cracking one open we had lying around, we found a PIC18 inside, but if you end up with a CH552G-based one, this would appear to fully fix it. Which isn’t bad for the merest fraction of the official adapter.

Thanks to [mip] for the tip.

A render of the USB Blaster, showing all the major parts

The Cheapest USB Blaster Ever, Thanks To CH552

April 30, 2024 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

Here’s a CH552G-based USB Blaster project from [nickchen] in case you needed more CH552G in your life, which you absolutely do. It gives you the expected IDC-10 header ready for JTAG, AS, and PS modes. What’s cool, it fits into the plastic shell of a typical USB Blaster, too!

The PCB is flexible enough, and has all the features you’d expect – a fully-featured side-mounted IDC-10 header, two LEDs, a button for CH552 programming mode, and even a UART header inside the case. There’s an option to add level shifter buffers, too – but you don’t have to populate them if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason! The Hackaday.io page outlines all the features you are getting, though you might have to ask your browser to translate from Chinese.

Sadly, there’s no firmware or PCB sources – just schematics, .hex, BOM, and Gerber .zip, so you can’t fix firmware bugs, or add the missing USB-C pulldowns. Nevertheless, it’s a cool project and having the PCB for it is lovely, because you never know when you might want to poke at a FPGA on a short notice. Which is to say, it’s yet another CH552 PCB you ought to put in your PCB fab’s shopping cart! This is not the only CH552G-based programming dongle that we’ve covered – here’s a recent Arduino programmer that does debugWire, and here’s like a dozen more different CH552G boards, programmers and otherwise.