Re: Carte Blanche arrives!

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Oct 1, 10:17 pm, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> mdj wrote:
> >> It may *look* that way but there is a caveat: it is 2 mm pitch rather
> >> than the more standard 0.1".
>
> >> In order to connect to the CB I use a "flyleads"  cable. You can get a
> >> genuine Xilinx one but it is expensive for no good reason - $25
>
> > I thought the flylead cable that ships with the CB could be used to
> > interface to the Xilinx dongle, or is the pin pitch too tight ?
>
> Apparently not.  As Steve pointed out (and I verified by reading the Xilinx
> cable docs), the USB platform cable has a smaller 2mm pitch header.  I broke
> down and ordered the flylead adapter and a female-to-female 2mm cable (for my
> Spartan 3 board) from Digikey.  Given the low price of the eBay platform
> cable, I'm not too worried about the extra expense.  But, that does beg the
> question:  What is the supplied jumper intended for?
>
> > I'd rather pay them $100 bucks or so for a WebPack license and not
> > have to worry about these unnecessarily proprietary tools. Those eBay
> > auctions were timely though - hope everyone has one now!
>
> Are you saying that the free WebPack can be licensed up to an unlimited
> version for $100??  I thought they wanted the big bucks (> $1000) for that.
> Can you elaborate?  I was never able to find any pricing information on
> Xilinx's web site and that usually turns out to mean "If you have to ask, you
> can't afford it".

Ah no, sorry Steve... I was just complaining about the fact that the
programmer cable you need to use ISE is ridiculously overpriced, and
uses a deliberately oddball connector, forcing you to buy overpriced
cables as well. Compare to the Digilent cable which is < $40USD and
does exactly the same job, but unfortunately isn't recognised by the
ISE stack.

So I was implying that I'd rather give them money for the software and
be able to use commodity hardware than have 'free' software that's
tied to money-for-jam priced hardware. It seems pretty dodgy to have
something as open and documented as JTAG one one side of the cable,
and a completely opaque API to interact with it on the other.

> I hate to seem unappreciative of Steve's documentation efforts, but I
> seriously doubt that any Apple 2 hobbyists are planning to buy an Altium
> Designer license :-)  In my opinion, this effort would be better spent showing
> off the use of WebPack.

I certainly won't be, but I wish I could - it's an amazing software
stack that's well worth the price.

An article on how to use a cheap Digilent cable (both parallel and
USB) to dump a bitstream onto the CB using free tools would be
worthwhile too, for those people out there who'd like to play around
with new images and who will inevitably end up putting their CB in a
state that can't be recovered using the SD card method.

Anyway, it's all good. It's great that hardware is now software,
despite it having to deal with all the complexities that software
development brings.

Matt