Is there anything wrong with bypassing the mprj_io[6]_ser___tx connection and treating it the same as the other gpio ports? For context, we are designing our own custom test-board and I realized that I connected an important digital signal to io_in[6]. We won't really be using the RISC-V CPU but might need it to enable the gpio ports as user inputs. Will bypassing the UART affect our ability to configure the gpio ports?

I'm pretty sure it won't be a problem. You definitely need the SPI interface for the RISCV to read and run firmware. But you may not even need that becase we now have to use user_defines.v to set the GPIO defaults

This is for an older chipignite project, submitted back in June 2022, so I didn't submit a user_defines.v

You won't have any issues with using GPIO 6. There are positions U2 and U3 marked on the development board that connect to the Tx and Rx lines. If those components are not installed (and I think they are not, in the assemblies we shipped out), then there is nothing connected to pins GPIO 5 and 6 to interfere with whatever you're using the pins for.

Ah interesting. Thank you