Altera Nios II Embedded Evaluation Kit Cyclone III Edition - Manual (Page 60)

Altera Corporation B–6
July 2010 Nios II Embedded Evaluation Kit, Cyclone III Edition
Creating Your
Own Loadable
Applications It is easy to convert your own Nios II design into an application which is
loadable by the Application Selector utility. All you need is a hardware
image (a Cyclone III 3C25 .SOF file) and a software image which runs on
that hardware (a Nios II .ELF file).
The only restrictions are:
1. The .SOF file must contain a CFI flash component.
2. The .SOF file must contain a Nios II CPU whose reset address is set
to CFI Flash at offset 0x00000000.
3. The size of the software image must be no larger than 4MB.
1 If you require a software image larger than 4MB, refer to the
section of this document titled
“Modifying the Application
Selector”
Once you have your working .SOF and .ELF file pair, perform the
following steps to convert them to a loadable application
selector-compatible application.
1. Copy both the .SOF and .ELF files into a common directory of your
choosing. This directory is where you will convert the files.
2. Copy the script:
examples/application_selector/application_utilities/
flash_file_conversion_script
to the directory where you copied your .SOF and .ELF files.
Optionally, copy it to a directory in the Nios II Command Shell
search path i.e. <nios2 install>/bin
3. Open a Nios II Command Shell and change to the directory where
you copied the .SOF and .ELF files.
4. Convert the .ELF and .SOF files by running the script:
./eek.sh <elf file>.elf <sof file>.sof
The eek.sh script runs the Nios II Command Line utilities sof2flash
and elf2flash to convert the .SOF and .ELF files to application
selector-compatible .FLASH files.
1 Feel free to open eek.sh in a text editor to see the exact commands
which are run.