S7 Not Connecting to Multsim

[jmuthig]

I am a teacher and have been successfully using the s7 in my classroom for 4 years.  I am at the point in the school year where I 'break' them out. For some reason the four S7s I've tried to connect thusfar to my reliable laptop (used for the past four years) will not communicate with Xilinx/Vivado anymore :( :( :(.  I have not updated any software and am currently using the recommended Vivado 2017.4 edition. I have even taken the time to unistall and reinstall the Vivado rather large Vivado suite again.  Same error :( .  All S7s give me a solid red 'pwr' LED and a solid yellow 'done' LED.  Please don't tell me the S7s are bad????   Attached is the error message and the installation instructions I rec'd for the Vivado download and install.  To the best of my knowledge all these S7s were working last year????????  

 

Please help!!!   

 

thanks, Jim M.

Xilinx+Vivado+Installation.pdf

[JColvin]

Hi @jmuthig,

I suppose there is a possibility that the PLTW S7's have gone bad, but it is unlikely that all 4 of them encounter the same problem at the same time independently of each other.

To receive dedicated support for the boards and Multisim, I would encourage you contact the dedicated PLTW support email, productsupport at pltw.org.

That being said, these are the hardware troubleshooting steps that I would try in the meantime:

• Presuming you are using a Windows machine, see if the PLTW S7 shows up in the Windows Device Manager when you connect it to the computer to confirm that it is being detected.
• See if the board is successfully detected by the Digilent Adept software, https://reference.digilentinc.com/reference/software/adept/start.
• If you have been using the same USB cable to test the multiple S7's, be sure to try a different cable (that does data and not just charging) to ensure that it isn't the culprit.

Thanks,
JColvin