I work for a Linux software house and would like to offer a "Hello, World!" tutorial for FPGAs. The idea is to keep it simple and low cost. The Digilent Basys board looks good for cost but not for (Linux) simplicity. I'd sure like to avoid the windrv module and the parallel port cable.
Does anyone know of a way to program the Basys board over the USB cable using Linux?
I don't know about that specific board, but there is an open-source user-space Linux driver for the Xilinx cables (USB and parallel). I am successfully using it with ISE Webpack 9.2i on Ubuntu 7.10 with a Spartan-3 board from Digilent. See
has a windrv replacement library which you can LD_PRELOAD before starting impact. Personally I have used it exclusively instead of windrvr for a while now and it works perfectly with the platform USB cable.
I've tried the USB driver and have followed the directions in the README to edit the udev rules, copy the *.hex files and to be sure /sbin/fxload is available. It looks like the firmware download is not taking place as the USB IDs do not change as expected after the firmware download. I still get root@pohl:usb-driver# lsusb Bus 004 Device 012: ID 1443:0005
ISE/impact give the following error when I try to download the BASYS bit file build in the demo project: Connecting to cable (Usb Port - USB21). Checking cable driver. File version of /home/Xilinx92i/bin/lin/xusbdfwu.hex = 1030. File version of /usr/share/xusbdfwu.hex = 1030. libusb-driver.so version: 2008-01-20 04:17:11. Cable connection failed.
I tried adding the 1443:0005 to ~/.libusb-driverrc but that did not make any difference.
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