How to load a design onto an Arty A7

You have an Arty A7 and a bitstream, and want to run the design on the board.

This is a volatile load: the design is lost at the next power cycle. To keep a design, use How to write a design into an Arty A7’s flash.

What a correct run prints is waiting for a run: test-designs issue #248.

What you need

Steps

  1. On the Raspberry Pi, load the design with openFPGALoader -b arty design.bit, and the FPGA runs it from SRAM.

$ openFPGALoader -b arty design.bit

Check

  • The board appears on the Raspberry Pi as two /dev/ttyUSB* devices, the JTAG channel and the UART channel.

  • The load’s last line ends with done 1. With done 0 the FPGA is not configured, whatever the exit status; the STAT register printed under it says why.

If it fails

What you see

Likely cause

Fix

no /dev/ttyUSB* device at all

the Arty’s FTDI is not on USB; a board in that state cannot be programmed or reached on its console

run lsusb. If it does not list the FT2232H, 0403:6010, check the USB cable between the board and the Pi

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