Xilinx USB Platform Cable Clone

[TerminalJack505]

For those interested, I've attached pictures of a Xilinx compatible programmer I purchased off of ebay for about 40 USD with free shipping.

The DVD that it came with seems to be an outdated copy of Xilinx ISE.  I didn't bother with it.  I have ISE Webpack 14.4 installed.  When I plugged it in the Xilinx drivers recognized the device and loaded without any problem.

I tested programming with a CPLD project that I had handy and it worked like a charm.

All in all I'm pretty happy with it so far.  The build quality seems pretty good.  There's one bodge on the board where they stacked-up two capacitors on top of one another but that's the only issue I noticed.  The soldering quality is good.  There is some residue leftover from the through hole components that they hand soldered but everything else is nice and clean and "right with the world."

I'll leave the attachments as thumbnails rather than include them inline so as not to picture bomb everyone.

[TerminalJack505]

A few more with more detail.

[olsenn]

I have the two-in-one Xilinx Platform Cable / Altera USB Blaster clone from Seed (http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/dsjtag-2-in-1-usb-jtag-cable-for-fpgacpld-p-1040.html?cPath=174) and it works well also. There's really not too much to these things so they're not difficult to clone

[amyk]

It has the Cypress FX2 chip... I wouldn't be surprised if someone in China is selling a variant that can also work as a logic analyser.

[tinhead]

this was a real clone:

http://www.mikrocontroller.net/articles/Xilinx_USB-JTAG-Adapter

shortly after we published it chinese shops started to clone our clone, of course "improved" down to price (e.g. no LT1719S6, etc)
Sure, they works as well, maybe not always (proper voltage detection) and not all modes, but well, for hobby use they probably good enough.

[TerminalJack505]

this was a real clone:

http://www.mikrocontroller.net/articles/Xilinx_USB-JTAG-Adapter

shortly after we published it chinese shops started to clone our clone, of course "improved" down to price (e.g. no LT1719S6, etc)
Sure, they works as well, maybe not always (proper voltage detection) and not all modes, but well, for hobby use they probably good enough.

Well, it's good to know that it was 'inspired' by German engineering at least.