Flashing the CU V2 without Alchitry Labs

Help Request
1

Hello! I love the layout of these boards, and would prefer them as my go-to hobby board, but I prefer not to use Alchitry Labs, or any other gui based environment.

With the Au, this should fine since I can tcl script with Vivado to flash the board with the program_ftdi utility. (Have not tested just yet)

However, I am attempting to program the ICE40 on the Cu V2 using iceprog and get the error (“Found difference between flash and file!”) alongside a failure.

Edit: When i try and flash, the LED stays red until reboot. The flash ID in iceprog appears as alternating sequence of 0xBF 0x26.

Does anyone have any tips on how to flash the Alchitry Cu V2 using open source CLI tools?

2

Hello,

You can use the alchitry-loader cli tool to flash the board from CLI :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Thank you for the pointer in the right directions, but this is giving me some issues.

It cannot detect my Cu V2. I may fork it to make it use libusb and any other needed changes.

edit: i am aware i could install libftd2xx, but id prefer to not.

Additionally, the repo seems to be lacking any mention of the updated boards, could anyone confirm whether the Cu loader is compatible with the Cu V2?

4

If the GUI works, then the CLI alchitry tool should work as well, assuming you’re using the CLI from Alchitry Labs V2. It should default to libusb on Linux.

In the bin folder of the Alchitry Labs V2 files, there’s two executables. alchitry-labs runs the GUI but alchitry is the CLI.