But when he plugged in the Xilinx Platform Cable USB, Windows 11 intercepted it. The dreaded “Driver cannot be installed” popup appeared. The VM couldn’t see the hardware.

Aris discovered the root of the evil: . The old Xilinx drivers, signed with an SHA-1 certificate that expired in 2016, were effectively dead.

His deadline was Friday. The satellite uplink window was Saturday. He had four days.

The problem was the software. The FPGAs required a specific, ancient toolchain: .