Cyclone 10 GX Devel. Kit Board Test System Failed

I struggled with this problem for about half a day so I'm sharing my solution.

The problem again was the BTS launched but after programming any of the samples it returns "Failed to read production information from this SOF in the FPGA".

The first issue was I had some older copy of the dev kit collateral .zip So go to the intel page for the cyclone 10gx dev kit and make sure you have the latest collateral archive.

Inside, the readme mentions you want to have Quartus prime pro 17.1 installed. So if you like me have a much newer version installed, make sure you download 17.1 and install it. They can be installed side-by-side.

However, there is another issue and when I launched BTS.exe I was getting an error about "invalid bit field" or something like that. The problem was the BTS program was not yet targeting the right quartus version. It gets the quartus install path from an environment variable QUARTUS_ROOTDIR. Go to your edit environment variables in windows and make sure that is set to C:\intelFPGA_pro\17.1\quartus. For me it was still pointing to a newer version of quartus. There is another env var QSYS_ROOTDIR = C:\intelFPGA_pro\17.1\qsys\bin which was already set correctly for me.

After that, I was able to run BTS .exe and program the dev kit and have it interact with the example designs succesfully.