Please help. How to fix when my ARTY-Z7's serial port is not detected by my PC?

[nics17]

I have an ARTY Z7-10 board whose serial port cannot be detected by my PC.

When I connected the board to my PC using a USB cable and opened the Device Manager, I found no port assignment under the "Ports (COM & LPT)" section. A serial port, such as COM10, should be shown in this section for the ARTY's serial port.

So far, this is what I have tried:

• Given that the board uses an FTDI chip, I tried to FT_Prog to scan the FTDI chip and the software detected it just fine.
• I tried to use Vivado's Hardware Manager to detect the board. It detects the board just fine.
• I tried to flash a program into the board using Vitis. The program flashed just fine and is working. However, I can't access the serial terminal to see any debug messages that the program prints.

Note: Other ARTY Z7-10 boards I have used don't have this issue. So, it must be an issue specific to this board.

Please help... How can I fix this issue?

Edited May 30 by nics17
Adding related tags

[JColvin]

Hi @nics17,

I apologize for the delay.

Since the board is correctly detected and programmed by Vivado/Vitis, I believe this issue can be resolved through the Windows Device Manager.

Connect the Arty Z7-10 to the computer, open the Windows Device Manager, expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers dropdown, and right click to get into the Properties of the USB Serial Converter B that appears when the Arty Z7-10 is connected.

Go to the Advanced tab of the properties and make sure the Load VCP box is checked, as this should enable the corresponding COM port.

(For clarity, leave Load VCP unchecked on USB Serial Converter A, as this is the JTAG connection that Vivado uses and so should not be a COM port).

Let me know how it goes.

Thanks,
JColvin

[nics17]

Hi @JColvin,

Thank you for your reply. Your suggestion fixed my issue. The COM port is now detected.

I am curious though, do you know any reason why the Load VCP got unchecked for this particular board?

Best,

nics17

[JColvin]

Hi @nics17,

No, I do not know specifically why it would become unchecked, particularly if you have other Digilent boards that are behaving as intended. The only thing that would have affected this setting would have been a driver change of some kind and since Digilent's drivers have not been changed in years, that would imply to me that it was some other driver change/update. But that theory doesn't hold up very well if you have other Digilent boards that were unaffected.

Thanks,
JColvin