Xilinx programming cable; Linux notebook w/o parallel port; Am I doomed?

no way. the parallel cable will NOT work with usb-2-parallel

Antti

I have seen PCMCIA/Cardbus plug in parallel ports that could solve your issue. Maplin in the UK have one

.and some others on Ebay.

Longer term we will be doing a fairly cheap S3E PCMCIA card that will have a programming solution integrated with it. It is on roadmap now as the result of some customer feedback and awaiting a free engineeriing slot. The integrated programmer can also be used to program other boards and will look like Parallel Cable III.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Soon to be Home of Tarfessock1. The PCMCIA Spartan3E Development Board.

Gues you'll just have to make your own.

Find yourself a (linux compatible) USB-enabled microcontroller and treat the problem as one of in circuit configuration of an FPGA by a micro.

You'll get higher rates if you let the micro do the timing and feed it buffered data through the USB. Trying to bit-bang it through the USB is possible, but really slow given the higher latency of things like USB-to-parallel chips vs old parallel ports.

I am not sure whether I understand that right. Are you talking about a general USB-to-parallel adapter that would work together with parallel cabel IV in connection with impact? Or is there another way to solve that?

I have been thinking about a USB-to-parallel adapter.

One thing I would like to avoid is having to program my own driver and preferable I would like to use an available virtual COM port driver. However, as I understand it, impact does not recognize those.

Unfortuanetly my notebook does not have a PCMCIA card.

Not sure what HP was thinking about. I guess I should not have gotten such a cheap one ;)

The only other solution I can think of is pretty nasty, and that is doing some linux driver work to emulate the bit banging over the usb cable parallel port.

On a sunny day (20 Mar 2006 13:07:34 -0800) it happened " snipped-for-privacy@spammotel.com" wrote in :

I am a bit anti-usb (because I still have not got to grips with those drivers

100% perhaps), but there exists a PCMCIA to jtag plugin module for tv hacking. Google PCMCIA to JTAG shows a lot. And then perhaps address the PCMCIA directly as IO? If you could use the par cable 3 JTAG soft (as Digilent uses to program the D2) maybe it would even be possible to connect that PCMCIA connector directly to that cable.. Have not tried. Memory mapped, make a simple interface?

The new Xilinx Platform USB cable does work under Linux. You apparently read some out-dated information.

snipped-for-privacy@spammotel.com wrote:

You are right, I found that information. What I saw before was from October of last year.

So I guess I will give that a try, before spending more time getting the cable IV to work.

I would try XC3SProg before giving up on the parallel cable. My feeling is that it might work since it uses system calls to set the parallel port instead of bit banging directly to the IO ports:

/Andreas

I have extended xc3sprog to also use the FT2232. The software is in no good shape, but shared on request ...

--
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

@all:

You guys are a bit over my head. I need to do some more reading on this.

Andreas Ehliar wrote:

Now if I understand that right, this is a replacement for impact, allowing to program Spartan 3 devices over the parallel port.

Is that really Spartan3 only or can I program my Spartan2 with that as well?

For using it with an USB port, I would probably need to use it with Uwe's extension for the FT2232?