USB connection of zybo z7 board not working

[erikS]

Hello,

I have a Zybo Z7-10 board, where the USB port does not seem to work at all anymore. Af far as I can remember I used it 2 Years ago and back then I could at least connect via JTAG to the Vivado HW Manager. But right now UART and JTAG do not work. I also tried the provided binary from this thread (https://forum.digilentinc.com/topic/20132-zybo-z7-usb-uart-no-longer-recognized-by-pc/). And even the "DONE" LED does not turn on. When I boot from QSPI and start the pre programmed demo, the board lights up and all the LEDs are flashing. So the board seems to work in general. But als during the QSPI demo there is no serial connection. On my host PC I don't see any message in dmesg as well. Is there anything that I could try to make it work or debug the issue further?

 

Regards,

Erik 

[JColvin]

Hi @erikS,

In case you haven't tried it, I would also suggest trying a different USB cable in case the one you are using doesn't support data. I know I've picked up random USB cables around my house thinking they'll work fine (because why wouldn't they) only to find after 30 minutes of fighting with drivers that I was using a charging only cable.

Thanks,
JColvin

[Ciprian]

Hi @erikS,

There could be one of two issues you are facing:

When installing Vivado on Windows it will automatically install the Digilent drivers when you are done with the installation. On Linux the drivers require sudo permissions which you don't have while installing Vivado. What you need to do is install them separately. The script for the drivers can be found here:

<install_location>/Xilinx/Vivado/<version>/data/xicom/cable_drivers/lin64/install_script/install_drivers

Make sure that you don't have any board connected and all Vivado related applications are closed  when you run the script. A restart wouldn't hurt either...

The second issue which you might be facing is that you have corrupted the configuration of your FTDI device which might be able to be recove4rd but it's something you won't be able to do without the help from Digilent.  

You need to try out the drivers first make sure that they are ok. I also recommend testing the board on a Windows machine with Vivado on it just to exclude any issues which are Linux related, before you assume that it's the FTDI controller.

-Ciprian

[erikS]

Hi @Ciprian

 

thanks for the rapid reply. Much appreciated! I tried both things you proposed. First I installed the drivers on my linux machine with sudo rights. But that didn't change anything, the script output even said that it was already installed. And hence I had no luck either with the serial port nor the jtag connection via vivado. I then tried to connect the board with vivado running on a windows machine. But it was the same picture... The Hardware manager did not find any devices. So I guess the driver can be ruled out as a problem?

 

Regards and Thanks,

Erik

[JColvin]

Hi @erikS,

How are you powering your board? Are you powering it through the microUSB port or are you using an external power supply?

Are you able to detect the FTDI chip in either the Windows Device Manager (it would be listed as USB Serial Converter A under the USB controllers dropdown) or on your Linux machine?

Thanks,
JColvin

[erikS]

Hi @JColvin

 

I tried both. Power via USB and external power supply. Both with the same result. On Linux the FTDI chip was not detected. I could not see anything in dmesg and there was now /dev/ttyUSBX device created. I didn't check the Windows Device Manager. Will do that next.

 

Thanks,

Erik

[erikS]

Hi @JColvin

 

I feel so stupid, I actually tried two different cables before, but apparently both of them were charging only cables... now I can see the UART working in the demo and the JTAG connection works in VIVADO but only under windows. But that's an issue for itself. Weird is though that the petalinux version I downloaded doesn't seem to work. But at least I'm one step further.

 

Thanks for your help!

 

Regards,
Erik

 

[edit]: Peta Linux works now as well. The problem was that I used a gpt partition table on the sd card. As soon as I used msdos it worked.