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Troubleshooting a Spartan-3E 500K Starter Board


cdeamaze

Question

I bought a Spartan-3E 500K Starter Board from ebay. The board looks new to me.  

When I plugged in the power supply, only 1 (red or power) of 3 LEDs (red, yellow and green) was on.  The remaining 2 LEDs were off.   In addition, there was no display on LCD.  What's going on with my board?  Is it a bad board?

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@cdeamaze,

Since you bought your board used, it's hard to tell.  There's no reason to believe that any factory demo would still be installed.

Usually, my first design when I have a new board is one that blinks the LED's.  If you need to go more basic than that, you can do one design to turn the LEDs off, and another to turn the LEDs on.  This will prove that 1) you can configure the board, 2) that the LED's work, and 3) if you blink them then it also proves that the board's clock works.

After that, I usually turn my own attention to the serial port.  Since that's the port I use to debug the rest of my designs, my next priority is to get some assurance that 1) the serial port works, and 2) I have the TX/RX pins properly identified.  You can find my favorite serial port testing software here if you would like.  (This would be that RS232 port you have ...)

Dan

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On 4/24/2017 at 7:09 AM, davep238 said:

It's been a while since I owned this board, so I don't remember anything about the LEDs. However, you should be able to download the demo file from Digilent, which should show if your board is working or not. See:

https://reference.digilentinc.com/reference/programmable-logic/spartan-3e/start?redirect=1

-Dave

 

Thank, Dave.

I followed the Digilent link that you provided.  I can't find any demo file there.  Can you or anyone else pinpoint which file to download or provide me another link?

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On 4/24/2017 at 3:50 AM, D@n said:

@cdeamaze,

Since you bought your board used, it's hard to tell.  There's no reason to believe that any factory demo would still be installed.

Usually, my first design when I have a new board is one that blinks the LED's.  If you need to go more basic than that, you can do one design to turn the LEDs off, and another to turn the LEDs on.  This will prove that 1) you can configure the board, 2) that the LED's work, and 3) if you blink them then it also proves that the board's clock works.

After that, I usually turn my own attention to the serial port.  Since that's the port I use to debug the rest of my designs, my next priority is to get some assurance that 1) the serial port works, and 2) I have the TX/RX pins properly identified.  You can find my favorite serial port testing software here if you would like.  (This would be that RS232 port you have ...)

Dan

Hi, Dan:

Thanks for your helpful suggestion.

I'll try blinking LED first and then serial port next followed by identifying TX/RX pins as you suggested. I'll certainly take advantage of your favorite serial port testing software here to speed up my debugging process.    I'll report to this forum whatever I can find or any problem I encounter as soon as I get them.

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