Bye, Adept

The idea of needing Adept to upload a bitloader, as a way to then load a bitstream into flash memory is… well… pretty ugly. I think Digilent should’ve done a way better job here by providing a direct-to-flash loader, would have saved thousands of hours to people using the CMOD boards.

But I found this beautiful project by Markus Nentwig which uses JTAG to upload a bitstream in the Artix 7. Built it in a snap, an packed it into a zip file together with the bitstream. This allows to completely get rid of Adept.

In a fresh computer install, the FTDI driver needs to be installed (the only positive and indirect benefit of installing Adept is that it does install the FTDI drivers). So if you previously installed Adept (or Vivado, or almost any other MCU or Arduino IDE, etc.) you might have these already installed (the bitloader will tell you if not).

Then type ‘bitloader’, and the board will be immediately set into load-to-flash mode. Next, just issue the standard ‘XLoad -img …” command.

This also allows the installation of the synths being scripted. Please let me know how this works for you if you try it.