Can't get my TF534 to flash

[macsonny]

Hi All,

I've built up a few TF boards from TF530, TF534 and TF536.

I'm reasonably good with surface mount soldering having built a number of similar complexity boards in the past and also flash Xilinx chips no worries.

However, I'm having a hell of a time getting these board to be even see in the flash software to be able to flash the various chips. Currently I'm trying to program the TF534 board.

Not one of the boards is seen in the flashing software. I've even got to the extent of removing the flash chips off each board and replacing with new chips just in case. No joy.

I can get the flash USB device to initialise in the software, but from there it will not see the chips on the board. If you look at there attached screen shots I'm able to get the json to load for each chip, but always get an error whenI try to initalize the chain or flash the chips.

I figure a bad build might be an issues, but to get the same result for 3 boards doesn't make sense to me.

Any advice greatly appreciated as I'm getting very frustrated trying to flash the chips right now.

Thanks

macsonny

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[supaduper]

Are the xilinx chips known to be good ? as a lot of the ones around now are rubbish

[macsonny]

Yes, I think they are good. Bought from Mouser which is generally a reputable supplier. I have also bought from DigiKey and got the same result so I'm thinking it's not the chips at this stage.

[dalek]

What method are you using to flash? Early on I bought a knock-off Xilink programmer and the cable pcb had bridged pins - took me ages to discover. If you have several boards it's unlikely to be the boards right? See if you can verify your programmer / cables /connections?

[macsonny]

Great question. I bought two programmers that have worked in the past programming Xilinx CPLD chips - I build mods for 8-bit Atari floppy drives and I've generally had no issues using this setup.

[dalek]

Silly question but before assigning a configuration have you tried a full erase?

Also it looks like you are running natively on windows - there is a virtualbox image available from xilinx that runs linux and just works out of the box. You passthrough your xilinx usb device to the guest... might be worth a try to rule out any windows funniness.

[supaduper]

As Darlek says, I had a problem once where one day I could program with impact and knockoff xilinx programmer then I could not, and the problem was I had installed a USB device and it had conflicted with the Xilinx so deleted it and all was good again and yes cables can be another headache, been there done that

[macsonny]

SO I moved to my built up TF536 and was able to flash the CPLD.

Issue now is the machine gives me a rolling error 33 so need to work out what that means?