Flashing/program via PCIe

[dannycoin]

Hi there..

1. can an Acorn CLE 215+ / Nitefury be flashed through PCIe without JTAG cable?
2. is it mandatory to use a JTAG cable to flash/program?
3. Is there a guide to flashing via PCIe?
4. Can I design in tools like Vivado and then flash / program via PCIe?

[RHSResearchLLC]

1. Yes, but only if there is already a bitstream that supports this. See https://github.com/RHSResearchLLC/NiteFury-and-LiteFury/tree/master/spi-loader
2. Only if you don't already have a compatible bitstream running
3. See https://github.com/RHSResearchLLC/NiteFury-and-LiteFury/tree/master/spi-loader
4. You can use Vivado to create .mcs, then load that MCS using the spi-loader

The factory 215+ bitstream probably won't work with the spi-loader (not sure). But the factory NiteFury bitstream should.

Finally, you can also use a FTDI for programming, with OpenOCD. Vivado doesn't recognize FTDI but OpenOCD does. I don't have an example for NiteFury, but here is an example for PicoEVB, which is similar: https://github.com/RHSResearchLLC/PicoEVB/tree/master/spi-flash-program-openocd

[Gbps]

I wrote up a guide here using the above info, hopefully this can help:
https://github.com/Gbps/nitefury-openocd-flashing-guide

[RHSResearchLLC]

Nice! I tried this same exact thing but it didn't seem to work, and I gave up rather quickly. Now that I think about it, I was trying on a blank flash, which probably wasn't properly configured. *Furys that have been programmed once have the flash preconfigured. Maybe I'll integrate your work with that caveat. Thanks again for this nice writeup!