Defective Alchitry board

I recently purchased an Alchitry Au FPGA Kit (KIT-16497) and I’m working my way through the Lucid tutorials at alchitry.com. I’ve noticed that many of the LEDs on the IO Element board do not work.

As a test, I created a new project based on the Base Project and programmed the following in the always block in au_top.luc:

always {

reset_cond.in = ~rst_n; // input raw inverted reset signal

rst = reset_cond.out; // conditioned reset

usb_tx = usb_rx; // loop serial port

led = 8h00; // turn LEDs off

io_led = 3x{{8h00}}; // turn IO LEDs off

io_seg = 8hff; // turn segments off

io_sel = 4hf; // select no digits

io_led = 3x{{8hff}}; // actually, turn on all of the IO LEDs

}

The result…

io_led[0][0] thru io_led[0][3] turn on.

io_led[0][4] thru io_led[2][0] remain off. These should be on.

io_led[2][1] thru io_led[2][7] turn on.

Through careful testing with the known-good LEDs on the board, I’ve also discovered that the DIP switches io_dip[0][5] and io_dip[2][7] are non-functional.

I’m not sure if this is a problem with the Au board or the IO Element board, but something is definitely wrong with the hardware.

Thanks for reaching out to us on this.

If both the DIP switches and LEDs are non-functional on the IO Element board, it is presumably the issue - just fill in the form on this page https://www.sparkfun.com/returns for the IO Element board and we’ll send out a replacement.

Hope this helps, and happy sparking!