NASR-M board bring-up, first JTAG connection
March 21, 2026 —
Nazim
We’ve got a JTAG connection, ladies and gentlemen. My cheap Xilinx platform cable I ordered from AliExpress actually worked. I’ve got two of them. The first one didn’t work well and was pulling down the 3V3 power supply low, but the second one - bingo! The next step is a bare-metal CPU test.
Lessons learned: before succumbing to despair and unmotivated aggression, check the bootstrap pins and set them to JTAG Boot Mode (MIO[5 - 3] = 0, 0, 0), and don’t ever forget to set the MIO2 to 0 - Cascade mode.
UPDATE If you are using Vivadio in GNU/Linux, make sure that Xilinx platform cable drivers are installed and udev permissions are set. Xilinx provides an easy way:
cd Xilinx/Vivado/2023.2/data/xicom/cable_drivers/lin64/install_script/install_drivers
sudo ./install_drivers