Xilinx USB Cable on Ubuntu

Here's what I did to install the "Xilinx Platform Cable USB II" on Ubuntu.

First, install the following two packages:

$ sudo aptitude install fxload libusb-dev

Then, download and compile the USB driver for the cable:

$ git clone git://git.zerfleddert.de/usb-driver
$ cd usb-driver
$ make
$ make lib32
$ ./setup_pcusb /opt/Xilinx/14.5/ISE_DS/ISE

If everything worked, you should see the status LED on the programmer light up after it's plugged in.

Programming Avnet Spartan 3A FPGA Eval Board with Linux

I own a small FPGA Board by Avnet with a Spartan 3A FPGA on it. The board is nice, but unfortunately, the flash chips on the board aren't on the JTAG chain. Instead, there is a small PSoC microcontroller that lets you programm the flashes via UART. There is a Windows tool to perform that programming which is shipped with the board. Here's what I did to program the SPI configuration flash on Linux.

Via the FPGALibre site, I found a link to a tool called ASTriAEKiPro, which allows me to write to the FPGA SPI Configuration flash via UART and the PSoC microcontroller.

Compiling the tool is as simple as running this command:

$ make

To erase the SPI configuration flash, I used this command:

$ ./astriaekipro -p /dev/ttyACM0 -e
Avnet Spartan 3A Eval Kit Programmer v1.2.1
Copyright (c) 2009 Salvador E. Tropea 
Copyright (c) 2009 Instituto Nacional de Tecnolog�a Industrial
Embedded BPI server provided by Avnet Inc. http://www.em.avnet.com/

Erasing the memory, be patient (>1 minute) ...

To write a configuration to the SPI flash:

$ ./astriaekipro -p /dev/ttyACM0 -w \
  -b ~/sandbox/avnet_lpc/projects/13.3/avnet_lpc/avnet_i2c.bit 
Avnet Spartan 3A Eval Kit Programmer v1.2.1
Copyright (c) 2009 Salvador E. Tropea 
Copyright (c) 2009 Instituto Nacional de Tecnolog�a Industrial
Embedded BPI server provided by Avnet Inc. http://www.em.avnet.com/

Writing 235820 bytes to the serial flash, offset 0x0000000
Erasing: sector   3 (100.00 %)
Bytes written:   235820 (100.00 %)
All written!

Edit Samsung TV Channel List on Linux

Samsung TVs suck when it comes to sorting the channel list. The work-around is to transfer the channel list to a PC and edit/sort it there. To edit the channel list on Linux, I found a tool called "SamyGO ChanEdit" quite useful. Downloadable via this link.

The tool requires SWT which is installed in /usr/lib/java on my system. To start the tool, used the following command:

java -classpath .:/usr/lib/java/swt-gtk-3.8.2.jar:SamyGO-ChanEdit-v54cd.jar gui.Main