Troubleshooting USB-Blaster errors

New season digital synthesis schools in full swing! The 3rd lecture has already ended, in which I dealt with Sequence logic on FPGAs, as well as clock and state circuits.

Personally, I am already coming to the school for the second time, I like the format of the classes, the methods of delivering information, the community that has arisen around the school, as well as thousands of enthusiastic eyes ready to learn digital synthesis within the school and beyond its walls. However, at today’s lecture, with great regret, it turned out for me that almost none of the participants and organizers know how to deal with errors in USB Blaster, or rather its Chinese analogue on Windows OS.

In this note, I want to talk about a method for flashing a Chinese programmer, which will save you from constantly popping up errors, the blue screen of death, the inability to flash the FPGA, etc.

So, this note is for you if you bought the cheapest USB Blaster programmer from Ali-express, and it stubbornly refuses to work in your OS.

Step 1

Download toolswhich allows you to flash Chinese microcontrollers of the CH family, which are the main element of the programmer itself. This 8-bit microcontroller Chinese-made devices designed to emulate the “native” programmer. After installing and launching the program, the main software window will open in front of you.

Step 2

Let's go to GitHub of the kind person who collected the firmware for our MK and download one single file: usb_blaster.bin. The author of the repository even has a whole fast about how this firmware was developed (I highly recommend reading it if you are directly interested in the reason for the old behavior of the programmer).

Step 3

Opens the case of our programmer.

Next, you need to pinch the legs with tweezers D+ And 3V3 on the device's circuit board. Then connect the programmer to the computer and immediately remove the tweezers from the legs. Hooray! The MK was switched to bootloader mode, and in the WCHIPStudio program, information was displayed that the device was recognized.

WCHIPStudio main window with USB Blaster connected

Step 4

Pre-downloaded file usb_blaster.bin place it in the Object File2 field. Then feel free to press the button Download.

The main window of WCHIPStudio after completing the programmer firmware

After flashing, you will receive a message indicating that your programmer has been successfully flashed. After which you can immediately begin testing it in combat conditions by running examples from the School of Digital Synthesis.

That's all! You can breathe out and not think about the fact that you will have to buy a new programmer.