As an FPGA developer that got layed off from my FPGA development job I saw this board as a good way to keep up my skill while I am away from daily development. I am so sad to see that by default Vivado is not supported. How can this be?
Does anybody have a tutorial for how I can use my Au V2 board with Vivado only without using the Alchitry tools or lab? If possible this would be my preference. I just love how portable the little board is.
Thanks for any tips/tricks!
Tim
You can use the “program_ftdi” tool provided by Vivado to make the board detected, so that you can use it in Vivado. See here.
Vivado can then flash to RAM, but if you want to persist your design in flash, you still have to use the Alchitry Loader.
This is caused by the JTAG-to-flash bridge used by Vivado only support a few flash chips and being closed-source and non-documented (afaik) so it can’t be fixed so far…
Thank you for the information.
I realized this morning that I probably needed to install the FTDI VCP driver for my laptop to see the USB as a JTAG. So I installed the driver and then boom Vivado worked as expected without needing to use the program_ftdi tool.
So I guess this proves that the V2 board was designed for Vivado development in mind.
Thanks
Tim
So now it looks like after I install the FTDI driver the Alchitry tools don’t see the board. I now always get “No Boards Detected” in the loader.
Are you using Windows or Linux?
@gc74,
I am using Windows 11. I wondered if there was a way I could temporarily disable the FTDI driver to use the Alchitry tool, then re-enable it to use Vivado.
Thanks,
Tim
I didn’t had to install any driver to use my V1, I just had to run the “program_ftdi” tool.
I don’t have my V2 yet so I can’t test anything, but there is this topic about detection issues in Labs, maybe it could help
You shouldn’t have to do anything (other than maybe installing FTDI drivers, but they’re normally included with Windows) to get the Au V2 to work with Vivado.
If you used Xilinx FTDI programming tool, then you likely didn’t name the board correctly for Labs to identify it. It needs to be “Alchitry Au V2”
Labs should be happy with the FTDI driver on Windows.
I just realized you said you didn’t flash the FTDI eeprom so it’s not likely that. Can you share some screenshots of what driver is loaded? The thread @gc74 shared has some useful debugging hints in it.
Sorry everybody, I was using the V2.0 alpha software instead of the latest. Once I installed the latest everything just worked as expected. Vivado works as-is etc.
Thanks.
Tim