[hpsdr] Cannot flash Mercury-EU with Metis and HPSDR

[Berndt Josef Wulf]

G'day,

Many thanks to all of you who responded to my email in support.

Here an update and the conclusions to the above problem for the benefit of 
those who are facing the same dilemma:

TAPR Mercury vs Mercury-EU FPGA pin assignments
================================
The design of TAPR Mercury and Mercury-EU differ to the extend that some of 
the otherwise unused FPGA pins are assigned to different locations on the 
ATLAS bus, including signals C5 and C6 utilized by Metis to communicate with 
the target board. This caused HPSDRProgrammer to fail to flash the Mercury-EU 
card. lt will require a special version of Mercury_JTAG file to work around 
this problem. My feeling is that the purpose of unused pins of the FPGA were 
not part of the original design specifications of the Mercury board.

As Mercury-EU is produced outside of TAPR, the problem remains of finding 
someone with the expertise and time to produce a modified version of the 
Mercury_JTAG file for Mercury-EU.

My solution
========
I rediscovered my old ByteBlaster and used the Altera programming application 
to upgrade the Mercury board to version 6.4. I've ordered a Mini USB Blaster, 
available for under US$13.00 on eBay including shipping, as PCs with parallel 
ports are getting harder to find.

73, Berndt
VK5ABN