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Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked

What follows is the story of how I fixed not one, but two, different flawed Altera USB Blaster clone devices that never worked correctly after I bought them. I recently built a few Time Sleuths for HDMI input lag testing.

I’m guessing the CPLD design has a subtle timing bug that the Windows version of Altera/Intel’s software doesn’t hit because it arranges the JTAG traffic in the USB packets completely differently. Normally this would be the end of this type of blog post, but you may have noticed at the top that I mentioned I fixed two different USB Blaster clones. I don’t want to toot my own horn too much, but it seems kind of ridiculous that these junk devices are being sold totally nonfunctional, yet it only took me one evening to piece together some open-source firmware to fix it.

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