Unbricking PlutoSDR in 2024

Question

Hi all, I am following the official Unbricking PlutoSDR wiki guide on a bricked Pluto, however as this guide is quite outdated, here I describe my attempt at unsuccessfully unbricking a Pluto. The hardware was handed to me after a team of satellite engineers had difficulty unbricking it, so I am not sure how a working unit should appear. My configuration is: Rev C/D Pluto with debug header soldered on with the key notch towards the edge of the board (Pluto enclosure is Rev.C but PCB is Rev.D, a known "feature" ) Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS (on an i5 Thinkpad) Vivado 2024.1 with updates 1 and 2 plutosdr-jtag-bootstrap-v0.39.zip from official releases JTAG-HS3 plus ADALM-UARTJTAG as used in the wiki guide Following the steps of the guide as follows: > After the JTAG programmer is connected, provide power to PlutoSDR using either of its USB connectors. Once powered the D5 led should illuminate to signal the JTAG connection to the programmer is alive. With the 10-way JTAG ribbon cable connected, I power the JTAG-HS3, then power the PlutoSDR (USB port "P3" plugged in to the PC, as shown in the guide figure). The red LED labeled "VIO" lights on the UARTJTAG board. My Pluto dimly lights the LED with designator DS2 (the one in the corner of the PCB). The Pluto LED DS1 remains off. > 1. Plug in JTAG as documented above into Pluto and verify you can connect with Vivado I run: $ source /tools/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.1/settings64.sh $ xsct ****** Software Commandline Tool (XSCT) v2024.1.2 **** SW Build 0 on 2024-09-05-05:57:41 ** Copyright 1986-2022 Xilinx, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ** Copyright 2022-2024 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Warning: XSCT has been deprecated. It will still be available for several releases.It's recommended to start new projects with new python command line tool. Use "vitis -s

Paul_Williamson · Accepted Answer

I won't attempt to repeat the amazingly thorough recitation of results that m0set provided in the thread above. I had what seemed like indistinguishable results. 
 However, I was able to get back control of my Pluto. In my case, the problem was that I did not realize that dfu-util needs to be run as root (with sudo) on the host machine. I found this surprising, because the operation is one that seems privileged only on the target device, and not on the host device. In the tutorials and documentation I read, there was no strong emphasis given to this requirement. Worse, the dfu-util program never gave any diagnostic message about permissions or any hint that it was restricted from operating on the target device. It just gave wrong results like this:

dfu-util: Device has DFU interface, but has no DFU functional descriptor

Deducing device DFU version from functional descriptor length

dfu-util: Cannot open DFU device 0456:b674 found on devnum 44 (LIBUSB_ERROR_ACCESS) 
 In retrospect I see now that "LIBUSB_ERROR_ACCESS" was trying to tell me about the permissions problem, but on first reading it seemed that the host was successfully talking to the DFU target, but that it was getting back results pointing to a problem with the DFU support in the target. 
 Once I noticed that dfu-util needed privileges to work correctly, I found that entering DFU mode using the button on the Pluto was working after all, and I was able to follow the rest of the instructions in the wiki article wiki.analog.com/university/tools/pluto/users/firmware under "Debugging DFU" to restore my Pluto. 
 As a side note, the privileges dfu-util needs are probably better granted with a udev rule than with sudo, but I couldn't find any documentation suggesting that. Possibly this is on purpose, since a suggested udev rule would be even easier to overlook than the use of sudo to run dfu-util commands. 
 My problem is solved. I hope this message helps others to solve theirs. 
 -Paul)

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Unbricking PlutoSDR in 2024

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