bad USBee ax pro USB blaster cypress based clone reprograming

USBee ax pro to USB Blaster reprogramming

Original lsusb output, for the device that is not recognized by quartus prime

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 08a9:0014 CWAV Inc. USBee AX-Pro

Its was sold as USB blaster clone done with a cypress chip, (CY7C68013A) with and eeprom 24C08N.

But it was never recognized as a USB blaster, by windows or linux. The quartus prime did no show it as available.

After some search and a precious tip from a friendly guy, I manage to download some firmware that it seems to work.

USBee ax pro reprogram procedure to USB Blaster that worked

The device have a the cy7c68013a fx2 chip and an 24c08n i2c eprom

Requires the small device c compiler and a firmware downloader for the fx2

# install required software
sudo apt-get install sdcc
sudo apt install fxload

# this repo have the software to access the eeprom
# we only need the vend_ax.hex
git clone https://github.com/ribalda/fx2eeprom.git
cd fx2eeprom
make

cd ..

# this repo contains the 
git clone https://github.com/dl3yc/fx2fw-sdcc

# copy a required file from the other repo to this one
cp fx2eeprom/vend_ax.hex fx2fw-sdcc

cd fx2fw-sdcc
make

After build it we need to send using the fxload utility

# this give an error
sudo fxload -D /dev/bus/usb/001/00x -t fx2lp -s vend_ax.hex -c 0xC2 -I usbjtag.hex
don't see a large enough EEPROM

# this work but need to be done every time we plug the device
sudo fxload -D /dev/bus/usb/001/00x -t fx2lp -s vend_ax.hex -I usbjtag.hex

lsusb shows the following info

Bus 001 Device 013: ID 09fb:6001 Altera Blaster

Main source links

https://fpga4u.epfl.ch/wiki/FX2.html
https://fpga4u.epfl.ch/wiki/Install_Firmware.html