DBAu1500 board flash downloading

First Name: Serguei
Last Name: Soloviev
Email: [email protected]
Company: Category: DBAu1500 board question

Dear sirs. Few days ago I started the work with DBAu1500 but unfortunatly among included software toolchain I didn't find any utility to download startup code into clean flash.

Does anybody have any flash programming utility wich probably works via EJTAG to download code to DBAu-flash or if I have absolutely clean or bad written flash due to uncleanly interrupted programming process for example due to power fail I need to insert it to the programmer to download boot software? I can not belive that there is no any simple utility working via LPT-port to do this. Pls. help me find such utility and a primitive sheme with one HC244 and few resistors how to solder an adapter from LPT to JTAG.

Thank u in advance.

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Serguei:

Rather than building an EJTAG interface, I recommend the Raven EJTAG interface. It plugs into your LPT port, and will plug into the EJTAG interface on your DBAu1500 board.

The device is available through {http://www.macraigor.com}.

Linux software for this device is available at {http://www.ocdemon.com/}.

I assume that you will probably be trying to re-load YAMON onto the flash device. I never tried re-loading YAMON, so I cannot comment about problems you might have hear.

But here's the path that I essentially followed. I co-authored a bootloader that can execute out of RAM, and wrote a driver for the AMD flash device. My bootloader uses a chunk of hacked-up YAMON code so that an SREC can be loaded through serial, and I wrote a simple driver for AMD mirror-bit flash.

The trick was to set the CP0 configuration registers over GDB so that you can load a bootloader into RAM, and then jump to the appropriate start address.

1. Plug in the RAVEN, turn it on.

2. Set the CP0 configuration registers through GDB so that RAM will refresh properly.

3. Load bootloader into uncached RAM through GDB and tell GDB to jump to the bootloader entry point.

4. Use the bootloader to erase flash.

5. The bootloader can also load an SREC through the serial port, and write it to flash. In your case, you would load YAMON.srec, and then write it to flash.

Good luck. Hopefully AMD support will be able to help you, too.

-Jeff

         Jeffrey Baitis - Associate Software Engineer

                    Evolution Robotics, Inc.
                     130 West Union Street
                       Pasadena CA 91103

 tel: 626.535.2776  |  fax: 626.535.2777  |  [email protected] 

I can recommend the Abatron BDI-2000 (www.abatron.ch). It's a powerful, flexible tool that will work in a variety of development environments. In addition to providing debugging features, it also has built-in flash programming algorithms. You can erase/program flash with simple console or script commands from various file formats transferred over the network using tftp.

	-- Dan

Yeh, I second that. The BDI-2000 has been a very valuable tool for me, both for debugging and flash writing. However, it runs about $2500 for one architecture (ie, MIPS). By the time you purchase the Raven and the various software packages it's almost as expensive, but isn't as good. If money isn't a problem, the BDI-2000 is the way to go.

Lyle