I've been getting into FPGAs again. I don't want to/can't afford a real Xilinx dev board or a real programmer, so I've been using bitcoin miner control boards, in the form of a EBAZ4205 . This board has a Zynq-7000 and a decent amount of IO. Programing was pretty easy with the XVC-PICO project. It basically emulates a Xilinx Virtual Cable (XVC) with a daemon that runs on your computer. It lets you program Xilinx FPGAs (and probably more) with a RP2040 microcontroller. This works great! I had a mess of dupont wires connected to my dev board's JTAG and the pico, and I could program the board.
I wanted a more permanent and cleaner setup though, so I made a ribbon cable connected to a pico that was a clean solution. However with this setup, I got a End of startup status: LOW message. Every time. I tried different computers, I tried ohming out teh cable, nothing was wrong, the pinout was right. I tried switching picos, nothing. I banged my head against this for a few days while out to Supercon. When I was home though, I pulled out the dupont wires again, and that worked. First time. I tried the pico that wasn't working? Worked. At this point I have no idea why the ribbon cable didn't work. I tried snipping the wires I wasn't using, I tried using more than one ground wire, I tried anything I could think of. Pictures below for shame: (Just use dupont wires next time! ):
