Papilio One Programming Issues

[Jack Gassett]

Hello Loop,

 

I'm afraid that those boards are unofficial Papilio clones, we've never made any Papilio One 100K boards and we've never made any boards that are blue...

 

I knew this day would come eventually, I guess it is finally here. We will do our best to support you since you are interested in the Papilio and I greatly appreciate that, but the sales from those boards are going straight into the pockets of somebody in Bangledesh and we are not seeing a penny. It is already a struggle to make ends meet with the sales from Papilio boards, I hope this does not become widespread...

 

So for your issues, here are two thoughts:

 

1) It looks like the 100K chip is detected and supported by the programmer. So the problem is either with the bscan bit file or with the board itself. Unfortunately I have never made a 100K board so I have no way to test or fix the bscan bit file. There will never be official support for the 100K chip, it is too small for any of our Soft Processors to run on it. If you want to work strictly with small VHDL examples then it is adequate. But if you want to run soft processors then it will not be up to the task.

2) With the other problems you are describing above about having to turn it off for a couple hours I think there is either a problem with the board itself or some components that they used on the board. I would ask them to replace the board to see if that fixes the problem. If it does not then I would consider returning it and buying an official board from us. All of our boards are tested at the factory to ensure that they function correctly, I'm not sure that the people who cloned these boards are aware of the test plan for the Papilio boards. Its something that is published but I always make a point to ensure the manufacturer's know about it and are following it.

 

Good luck and keep us posted.

 

Thanks,

Jack.

[james1095]

That is one of the few problems with open source hardware. You will always end up with clones of varying quality out there, though it's a small price to pay IMO. Always best to buy from an official seller if you want to make sure that it will work out of the box.

[alex]

Jack has a point, while we as a community are more than happy to give you some helpful pointers troubleshooting issues, you should really go back to the people you paid money for the board and ask them to sort it out. Do they have a replacement policy?

 

The fact that your whole board goes bad after using it a while then come right after leaving it powered off shows there is something else wrong with it. Smells to me like a temperature related issue. Does anything get hot to the touch, especially the regulator chips? Do you power it from USB or from an external power source? If external, what voltage are you putting in? If the voltage is too high (meaning the regulators have to convert a lot of it to heat) that might be a problem.

 

In any case, contact the shop and ask for a replacement, preferably one they can test prior to shipping.

 

Jack has always offered free replacements no questions asked for items bought from the official store. One of the many good reasons to buy from here

[loop_51]

I tried USB and external power... there isnt much difference between them..... I am using a 9V SMPS

 

I did contact the people selling me this BLUE Papillio One, they did not mention that it was a clone however they did have their name printed on the board along with Gadget Factory name... unfortunately at the moment the person responsible for this is on a vacation. They did replace a board before... it had problems with its external power....

 

Now that you mentioned temperature problem... The FPGA does feel a bit warmer than other parts of the board... but only slightly... 

 

Can it be possible that there are manufacturing faults in the board... not an effective short circuit but some signal integrity issue... I heard that JTAG modules are very frequency dependent (if the oscillator isnt accurate enough)... Can it be the case... (I dont exactly know how JTAG works... feels like a perfect time to read more about it)

 

I have a AVR Dragon which has a JTAG debugger... can I use it to debug the JTAG feed on the Papillio One? Or the AVR Dragon only works on AVRs...

[Jack Gassett]

Loop,

 

Here is a question, are you powering the Papilio board with a 9V wall adapter plugged into the large DC power jack? If you are then I would recommend that you don't use that method, just plug the Papilio into a USB power jack and power it that way. The Papilio was really intended to be powered from the USB jack, the DC power jack was added just in case the 500mA's from the USB power jack was not enough power. But there are not any projects out there that have not been able to run off the 500mA's provided by USB so there is really no purpose for the DC power jack in my opinion. 

 

Try to use USB power, there are less components involved so less to go wrong.

 

Jack.

[james1095]

9V is awfully high for a linear regulator that is putting out 3.3V. Keep in mind that the regulator will be burning up twice as much power as it is providing to the load.

 

It's normal for the FPGA to run slighty warm, although it should not be too hot to touch. You might try checking the voltage rails as the board warms up and see if one of the supplies is sagging. It's also possible that the oscillator frequency is drifting with temperature, although I wouldn't expect that to matter for programming. I've certainly seen bad PCBs, it's not terribly common, but they can develop bad or intermittant connections, usually where a via connects a trace from one side to a trace on the other.

[loop_51]

James, according to the schematic the external power supplies a 5V regulator according to the schematics, I checked it on the board too... so 9V to a 5V linear regulator should be fine. This 5V regulator then converts to 1.2,2.5 and 3.3Vs...

 

My guess was a problem with the PCB.. cant quite fix it externally can I? or even isolate the bug... but it should be in the JTAG connections right?

 

Thanks Jack.... I am mostly using usb Jack, but I was planning on building a SPI module(on the FPGA) that would connect with a AVRs SPI module... I wanted to connect my AVR dragon to the AVR which takes a lot of power hence the DC jack.

 

Anyway sorry I couldnt get it from GadgetFactory directly. The delivery system and the payment method of the local distributor was much more simple. Can you add other shipping options like FEDEX or DHL or UPS...

[Jack Gassett]

The DC jack does power a 5V regulator which in turn powers the 1.2, 2.5, and 3.3V regulators. The lower voltage you use the better off you will be as there will be less heat as the the votage regulator drops the voltage down from 9V to 5V.

 

9V is on the high side of what is recommended, anything as close to 6.5V as possible is better.

 

You can try to touch up the JTAG connections, or synthesize a new bscan file from the Papilio Loader source code on github.

 

For shipping, through much trial and error, we have found that USPS First Class International with insurance is the best option. We have offered Fedex, DHL, and UPS in the past, but all of those services are unreasonably priced. It is usually $30-60 to ship using those options, with $30 being for Europe and $60 for Asia.

 

Jack.

[james1095]

Whether you go from 9V to 5V to 3.3V or 9V straight to 3.3V makes no difference in dissipated power when dealing with linear regulators. All it does is spread it between two regulators which helps slightly but there is still a lot of heat on the board. A linear regulator is effectively nothing more than an electronic resistor that varies its resistance as needed to keep the output voltage constant. Any excess voltage is converted to heat. I don't think this is responsible for the problem you're having, but a lower input voltage is recommended.