Recover a bricked Microsemi Flashpro6?

[nctnico]

Well, another hurdle to overcome trying to get to work with the Microchip Polarfire FPGAs....

At the first attempt the software asked to update the Flashpro6 leaving me with a non-functional device and no clear answer as how to recover it. Any ideas on how to recover it or should I send it back to Mouser for an exchange? I really don't want to wait for another unit to arrive especially since these programmers seem to have sold out everywhere.

[nctnico]

Well, another hurdle to overcome trying to get to work with the Microchip Polarfire FPGAs....

At the first attempt the software asked to update the Flashpro6 leaving me with a non-functional device and no clear answer as how to recover it. Any ideas on how to recover it or should I send it back to Mouser for an exchange? I really don't want to wait for another unit to arrive especially since these programmers seem to have sold out everywhere.

I managed to get it working again with the help of Microchip support. I had to download FP6_Update_V12_3_Windows.zip from a hidden place on their website. This tool didn't work out of the box though. As the Flashpro6 programmer is based on a Cypress chip, I tried to update the EEPROM first with the Cypress tooling by loading the .img file from the archive. After that the Flashpro6 could be updated with the tool provided by Microchip. I find it rather surprising the whole update process of the Flashpro6 is so frugal and amateurish. These things cost well over 200 euro! Actually I wouldn't mind paying extra if it where more robust. I wasted way more time (=money) compared to the cost of the programmer.

[shockhouse]

Do you have details on the Cypress loading the image file method you used? I'm in the same boat with 2 bricked programmers, and trying to recover them.

[nctnico]

I think I used the tools from ezusbfx3sdk_1.3.5_Windows_x32-x64.exe which I downloaded from Cypress. With that I loaded SlaveFifoSync.img from the FP6_Update_V12_3_Windows package into the EEPROM. Afterwards the FP6 got out of it's identity crisis and could be updated from FP6_Update_V12_3_Windows. I ran all this from a laptop with Windows 7.