HS2 with Coolrunner II

[Imjustatech]

Hello all,

 

I'm working on moving from Windows XP to Windows 10 in our test department, which means Xilinx has no official way of allowing me to program Coolrunner II devices. Based on the HS2 and Adept product pages, it seems as though I should be able to program these boards with just those two, but I encounter an error when attempting to do so:

Getting device ID of XC2C64A...
Device ID: 06e5e093
Set Config file for XC2C64A:  "file.jed"
Preparing to program XC2C64A...
No map file found.  Xilinx ISE must be installed.
Programming Failed.

 

Where did I miss the indication that I'd need ISE installed in order to use Adept? More importantly, ISE 14.7(the deprecated version for Win7 which supports CRII) is already installed on this computer, so it seems that requirement should be met.

 

Thanks in advance for any responses.

[JColvin]

Hi @Imjustatech,

I spoke with our design engineer (who designed Adept) about this and they confirmed that Adept should not need ISE to load a .jed file because all of the appropriate map files are within the Adept application so it can access them on it's own. The only recommendation they had would be to uninstall Adept and then reinstall it; for reference you can download Adept 2 from it's Resource Center here: https://reference.digilentinc.com/reference/software/adept/start.

Also as a confirmation check since Adept does not support every FPGA and CPLD, is this the FPGA you are using that has that Coolrunner ii chip on it?

Thanks,
JColvin

[Imjustatech]

Hi @JColvin,

We are not using that FPGA. The Coolrunner chip is on a customer board that we program via a JTAG connector.

 

I will reinstall tomorrow to see if that helps.

 

Thank you.

[Imjustatech]

Well, it took much longer to get to than I expected, but I reinstalled Adept to no avail.

I'm beginning to wonder if there's some major thing I'm missing here about compatibility. The specific CPLD I'm trying to program is an XA2C64A-7VQG44I, if that makes any difference. If there should be no need for ISE to be installed, how is Adept even coming up with that error?

[Imjustatech]

@JColvin, is there any more light you can shed on this problem?

 

Thanks.

[JColvin]

Hi @Imjustatech,

I apologize for the delay. Since the chip your customer is using seems to be a Xilinx automotive chip, those particular map files are not loaded into Adept, so Adept is not able to recognize it and properly program it on it's own unfortunately. You would either need ISE installed or your own custom application in order to program that chip, however from what I recall, the ISE that Xilinx released for Windows 10 only supports Spartan 6 devices, so I do not think it will readily work in that case.

Thank you,
JColvin

[Imjustatech]

Thanks for the reply @JColvin. It seems that somewhere in the midst my attempts to find a working ISE/driver combination my Xilinx installs must have gone wonky. It was bad enough that I couldn't actually uninstall everything and had to reset the pc, which Windows 10 luckily makes very painless.

The end result is that with a good install of ISE14.7(non-Win10 version) I can program my Coolrunner II with Adept and the HS2 on Windows 10. Huzzah.

As a follow-up question(if allowed in the same thread), is it currently possible or are there plans to make it possible to program through Adept via command line? We automate all of our programming operations and it's nice when we can do it via command line rather than relying on UI-based control.

Thanks again for the help, I'm happy to have one less road block for this XP to Win10 transition.

[JColvin]

Hi @Imjustatech,

If you want to do some command line utilization with Adept 2, what you will want to use is the Adept Utilities which is available for download on the right hand side of the Adept 2 resource center. My understanding is that the part of the Adept Utilities that you will want to use is the djtgcfg.

Let me know if you have any other questions about this.

Thanks,
JColvin