Debugging tool for the FTDI FT2232H in Sync FIFO mode

Question

Does anyone know of any software available to take data from the FT2232H in 245 FIFO Sync mode and write it to screen or to a log file?

Basically, I am using the FT2232H IC to transfer a large amount of data from an FPGA over USB. I chose the IC because I've had some experience with FTDI chips before using their VCP (virtual com port) driver and because of the USB2 speeds available.

Unfortunately, it needs to use the D2XX driver, which doesn't allow it to show up as a virtual com port on my windows machine so I can no longer use TeraTerm to display data being sent through the IC.

It seems to me that the FT2232H in sync FIFO mode should be a popular enough option that someone has already written software for a windows machine that would let me see data coming off the USB - either on screen or to a text file. A google search didn't turn anything up and I figured this is a valuable enough question that others might be interested in the answer too.

Answer 1

I've got a test utility that I made for an application that uses a 245 FIFO. You can download the source code for my test program here. It's written in Visual C# Express 2010, which you can download quickly and free to make whatever modifications you want.

As you can see in the picture below, the test utility is extremely specific to my application, so it won't be very useful to you without some minor mods, but my guess is that you could adapt it to do what you want in an hour or two. You can look at the ReadRegister and WriteRegister functions to see how to read/write from the device.

HOWEVER I use the D2XX drivers and I'm pretty sure that I can still access the virtual comm port through a terminal program. So I'm not sure that you really need a D2XX based tool.

Let me know if you need any guidance.

Answer 2

I use the FTDI chipset daily as the UART interface of choice when interogating fpga's we use at work.

As such I have a python module that interfaces with the ftdi driver and provides a pythonic interface.

simply commands like:

get_device_info_list() will print all FTDI devices registered by windows/linux

open_ex(serial='') will open an FTDI device with the names serial port & return an FTD2XX

a FTD2XX object then has typical commands like:

FTD2XX.write(lpbuffer='some_ascii_string') # will write an ascii string to the device

FTD2XX.get_queue_status() # will return the number of bytes in the READ buffer

FTD2XX.read(NUM) #will read NUM number of bytes ... Plus a load of FTD2XX driver commands (purge, baud_rate... ). If you are willing to use python I can provide you the link to my python module.

A simple script like:

devices = list_devices()
ft = open_ex(devices[0])  # open the 1st regardless
ft.purge(to_purge='TXRX')
while True:
  print ft.read(ft.get_queue_status())

should produce a similar functionality

Answer 3

Maybe someone would be interested. I've created FIFO terminals for FTDI FT2XX in C# and python https://github.com/perehinik/FTDI_FT2XX_FIFO_Terminal_C_sharp https://github.com/perehinik/FTDI_FT2XX_FIFO_Terminal_Python