Re: Carte Blanche arrives!

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

On Oct 2, 11:05 am, Alex Freed <alex_n...@mirrow.com> wrote:
> > Ah no, sorry Steve... I was just complaining about the fact that the
> > programmer cable you need to use ISE is ridiculously overpriced,
>
> Yes. However the $10 payed on ebay helps a lot. There are also
> compatible clones of the Xilinx USB cable available new for about $120
> with cables on the same ebay.

And Digilent have one for $59 that's Impact compatible too, but I
would think by now everyone has one.

> > uses a deliberately oddball connector, forcing you to buy overpriced
> > cables as well.
>
> No. The overpriced USB box comes with the cable and 2 mm flat ribbon
> cable is not exactly exotic.

Just exotic enough that the the local electronics shops don't stock
the connector unfortunately :-S

> >Compare to the Digilent cable which is < $40USD and
> > does exactly the same job, but unfortunately isn't recognised by the
> > ISE stack.
>
> Right. And the cable we include could be used with minimal hacking to
> connect to a Digilent cable. To just load a bit file the Digilent
> software works perfectly. What you don't get is the ChipScope - a logic
> analyzer inside the FPGA - but you need a full (expensive) Xilinx
> software to use that anyway.
>
> So to just load configurations made with free tools you can either use a
> cheap Digilent USB cable of a used Xilinx one.
>
> As I wrote before if you have a parallel port and don't mind waiting 15
> seconds for the configuration to load you can use a $12 cable that is
> compatible with Xilinx iMPACT and friends.

Alas I no longer have a PCI slot to plug it into :-)

Matt