UART drivers not working in Win10 Pro/Home 64bit

Question

Hi, I just got a Zedboard and I am trying to get it up and running but I am getting stuck right at the very beginning with getting the UART connection to work. I followed the included instructions with the board. I got the Green Power light, blue done light, "digilent" image on the OLED, and a solid amber light on the UART LD11. I went to the next step that says you need to install the driver for the Cypress CY7C64225 USB-to-UART. I found the the 1.3 install guide from here: http://zedboard.org/support/documentation/1521 I went to the Cypress site, got the CypressDriverInstaller_1 file and installed it. It said it installed fine(* there are discrepancies with the install guide after install, which I will get to in a minute ). The amber light turned off instead of blinking. Tried reconnecting the Zedboard, turning on/off, restarting computer. In all cases, the UART amber light is off and I cannot connect with a terminal program. Compared with the install guide there are some things that are different in the device manager. There is no device listed as "CypressUsbConsoleWindowsDriver" as Figure 4/Step 9 shows. Under Ports ( COM and LPT ), it is called USB Serial Port ( COM4 ), not "Cypress Serial". USB Serial Port is the Zedboard as it only appears if I turn on the Zedboard. Going into the properties for the USB Serial Port under Port Settings->Advanced as steps 10 and 11 indicate, there is no option for Enable Port Persist, but under "Com Port Number" dropdown box ( bottom of the picture step 11 ), there is an option for "enable RTS-DTR Flow Control" and "Other Serial Device Setup" with the option "Compatible I2C Slave Device Address (7 bit Even Address ) with 0x42 in the textbox. USB to UART Adapter is under "Universal Serial Bus Controllers" but is not mentioned in the install guide. I started checking the forums and found this post: http://zedboard.org/content/uart-driver-does-not-work-new-pc and tried ALL the suggestions there with no change. That thread was pretty old so I thought I'd start a new one. If I uninstall everything and turn on the zedboard I can get the solid amber light back. I also tried hooking up the Zedboard to a laptop running Windows 10 Home 64-bit, with the exact same results. OS: Windows 10 Pro 64 bit USB Serial Port Version number after Cypress driver install: 3.13.0.59 dated 10/13/2105 USB to UART Adapter Version number after Cypress driver install 3.13.0.59 dated 10/13/2015 I'm pretty much out of ideas at this point and could use some more suggestions. A few other details. Thanks in advance.

rathseg · Accepted Answer

I solved this. The instructions are incorrect in several ways. The amber LED only blinks if there is active traffic going to the UART ( e.g. connected via TeraTerm and watching the LED as you send a command ). So when step 6 of the "Getting Started Instructions" card included with the device the instructions says you should see the light flash as an indicator as to whether or not you need to install the drivers; it is wrong because the light will not flash at that point no matter what. The USB to UART driver installation instructions are also out of date or incorrect. I finally got drivers working by manually installing the Win 7 versions from the extracted driver install directory. Even in those, there is no "CypressUsbConsoleWindowsDriver as Figure 4/Step 9 shows, nor is there a setting for "Enable Port Persist" in the USB Serial Port driver properties ( steps 10 and 11 ). Apparently, you don't need either of these. Lastly, and this may be my bad since it has been a long time since I have had to use a terminal emulator, but when you connect via TeraTerm, it will sit there with just a cursor block and nothing else, which gave me the impression that it was trying to connect and was hanging/failing. You have to hit return/enter and then it will respond with a prompt that says "zynq>". To be fair though, I did try connecting via Putty when I first started with the Win10 drivers and got a timeout message. Maybe my Putty telnet settings were off and the Win10 drivers are actually fine, but I don't care enough to double check since I have it working now. Hopefully this will save other people from wasting a bunch of time like I did.