loading the Digilent Nexys2 board

[A. Maitland Bottoms]

I was loading my Nexsys2 board at the meeting tonight....

Some basics:
USB cable plugged into laptop.  With the Power Select jumper
in the USB position, turning on the power switch lights the
red power LED. With the Mode jumper on ROM, the board will
load the demo code from ROM and light up the 7-segment LED
displays and the switched will turn on and off the other LEDs.
The Yellow Done LED lights when the load completes.

What was up to was with the Mode jumper in the JTAG position.
Yes, there is a JTAG cable header, but that was not what I was using.

I had only a little earlier in the day come accross a fine
bit of clue: http://www.edaboard.com/ftopic345414.html
That led me to the good stuff in
http://plausible.org/andy/nexys2prog.tar.gz
(Note: UrJTAG is already in a Debian package
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/urjtag)
This allowed me to avoid needing to use the "Digilent Adept Suite",
and thus, Windows.

So I could use the Xilinx ISE WebPack to convert some example
verilog source files into a .bit file, then use the
nexys2prog to load the board with that .bit file.
All done on a Debian laptop.

So far I have been loading the FPGA directly, and have not been
using my new-found JTAG ability to load the onboard ROM.

Just hit the reset button, and the board is ready to get
another bitfile load, run nexys2prog and reconfigure the
hardware on the fly.

-Maitland