Red-V Getting it to debug with Windows 10 - Missing drivers on instructions page

Development Boards
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Anyone who want to get a Sparkfun Risc-V Red board debugging with Windows 10 , this is what you need to do.

Note - the idea for the drivers came from this post

viewtopic.php?p=211369#p211369

  1. Try the instructions that are well out of date here

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/re … ment-guide

You will notice you have 2 entries under Ports (COM & LPT) in the device manager - so it will look like the board is working - but its not . For it to work you need to see under Ports (COM & LPT) in the device manager

JLink CDC UART Port (COMN)

JLink CDC UART Port (COMN+M)

Obviously N and N+M are numbers of the com port - BTW the 2 numbers are not always contiguous

  1. Back to the red-v instructions, Ignore the part about installing Windows 10 drivers, there isn’t an executable for Windows 10 in the folder they mention, so in here

M:\FreeSt\SiFive\jlink-6.80.1-2020.06.03\USBDriver\x64

There is no executable, same for both the amd64 and x86 folders - no executable to run just dlls. There is an executable (with a different name a few folders up in the USBDrivers folder called InstDrivers.exe - but running this throws an error, and it doesnt take a help parameter. So is no way to use the drivers in the Freedom installation anymore, probably why the whole thing fails.

  1. You should be able to build a binary(hex) by following the instructions, and drag and drop it on to the devices drive (use windows explorer to see the drive as it appears when you plug in the device). Use a coding example that gives you something visible i.e. a flashing LED (blinky) so you know when you drop it on the devices drive if its working or not - dont bother with Serial/UART that wont work either yet

  2. Now go and install Seggers Embedded IDE for RISC - its free for single user - even though pricing doesnt tell you that on website

https://www.segger.com/products/develop … ns/risc-v/

  1. Run the Seggers IDE (make sure you have nothing else running) - this will detect the JLink drivers and update them on the device. To do this build an example project and make sure you can debug by putting a breakpoint on and running the binary on the device (not QEMU etc).

6.Kill off Seggers (although it looks better than Freedom IDE to be honest) and go back to the Freedom IDE, and now its all working !!

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Thanks for posting this! We’ll take a look at updating our documentation for these