This page is for developers only
Users check out GenBoard/UnderDevelopment/FirmwareChanges and BootLoader.
After you have compiled your firmware (you read GenBoard/Firmware/BuildFirmwareFAQ )
Uploading the firmware is really easy.
You can construct a device for 1 Euro in about 5 minutes from a DB25 male connector if you have a PC with parallel port.
Don't forget to save old configuration and tables with mcd and mct commands before upgrading the firmware!
The human-readable ascii output of these commands can be grabbed from the serial interface. Name them etc/config.txt and etc/tables.txt.
After the new code is in place, restore the config:
make mtt
and dump the etc/tables.mtt, etc/config.mtt files to the board with a TerminalProgram. See GenBoard/InitialConfig for initial configuration.
[[Manual: Detailed.Central.Firmware.Install]]
This is great news. For motorola you need a $65 ($49 programmer + $16 adapter for processor) equipment (theoretically you can build a whole GenBoard for that!), or send your board to some of the kind people who can program it for you (and you need to mess with a socket).
http://www.futurlec.com/MotorolaProg.shtml
[[Manual: Detailed.Central.Firmware.Install]]
asking for help regarding boot/main.c upload
I usually upload bootloader via avrdude (see bin/mintest.sh). However I'm not satisfied:
- avrdude sends 128kbyte instead of just the upper 2 kbyte (ideas?) Tried UISP?
- we'd like to store some information in flash, maybe 6 bytes right below the flagword: (byte address 0x1FFF8..0x1FFFD ?)
- board version
- board assembly variant (flags: knockchip, etc...).
- maybe calibration data would also be useful (hard to fit if bootloader is kept in 2 kbytes .. maybe on a page below ).
- board serial number
We'd need a small script that puts these into the boot/main.hex. Either perl or gcc could be used to achieve this.
Script added to cvs and the bootloader is patched slightly. 12 bytes are now available that can be read through the menu interface.
If you choose to diverge from what most of us use, or over-curious here are some links:
- google: atmel isp programmer parallel
- http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~awoo/smartdust/cable.html
- http://bray.velenje.cx/avr/
- http://medo.fov.uni-mb.si/mapp/uTools/uisp-parport-connect.txt
- http://wiredworld.tripod.com/tronics/atmel_isp.html
- http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbolt/e-spider_prog.html
- http://www.burnill.freeserve.co.uk/atmel.htm
- http://www.x-dsl.hu/programmer.txt my notes on the programmer cable I built for uisp. We use the STK200 cable with uisp and avrdude.
- http://www.freeweb.hu/vfx/avr/index.html another description about a simple programmer Hungarian, with graphics
Atmega168 ISP program upload
With a smaller HW (not GenBoard, but a related LED display), we want to upload program to virgin atmega168 uCs (no BootLoader yet, that's exactly what we want to upload: ISP upload is needed, which is not supported by avrprog). Preferrably programming process should work on linux and win32 too.
avrdude avrdude works for MembersPage/MarcellGal on win32 too. (a bit annoying that avrdude uploads 128kbyte whenever we write BootLoader to the upper 2 kbyte location. No big deal, we used avrdude traditionally for virgin genboards).
Avrdude supports Atmega88 since ages. I modified avrdude.conf for atmega168, according to the datasheet
- flash size and pagesize
- added a12
- added a5 to some places, and deleted from other places (since pagesize changed from 32 to 64 words).
It seems to work, will be commited to SubVersionSVN. Beware: still under testing. Where should we contribute it? Some avrdude developer list ?
uisp only works well for MembersPage/MarcellGal on Linux only
This sounds bad: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/uisp/ the new 20050207 version also adds support for AtMega88 and AtMega48 (note: NOT atmega168), and it's compatible with g++-3.4 => We might need to hack atmega168 support in.
- http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/uisp-dev/2003-05/msg00000.html on win32 it says "/dev/parport0: No such file or directory Failed to open ppdev."