Hello all, I recently bought one of the Parallax Stratix "SmartPack" boards on eBay. It was a good deal, and the FPGA works fine, but I've run into a bit of trouble with the PX loader program.
I'm not clear whether it is a problem with the loader itself, the serial port. I don't suspect the PIC microcontroller, as the initial default configuration loads. The trouble is, I don't understand the failure, or the protocol. I know from the docs that the binary data is RLE compressed, but I don't understand the handshaking stuff. I'm working on finding a workable configuration, but so far it hasn't gone too well.
In the event that I can't get the PX stuff working, I thought about just depopulating the PIC, and dead-bugging an appropriate configuration memory to the board. The problem is that the nStatus line may not be available. I do have access to nCONFIG, DEV_CLRn, CONF_DONE, DCLK, and DATA0.
I'm curious to know what would happen if one wired in, say, an EPCx device, and left the nCS line tied active. In theory, if you don't reuse the bit in the design, shouldn't it be harmless? Will this confuse the EPCx?
Thanks!