Nishanth' tech rambles

In the quest for a proper debug tool.. printfs have been my friend so far.. but printfs cannot help in many cases optimally.. JTAG is the right solution for such cases. keesj and I have been independently working on getting openocd working with flyswatter . http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardJTAG is the starting point in this quest! join us, provide your thoughts etc.. [ Update : Sept 3, 2008: 1. keesj has mailed an excellent report to the beagleboard list on his progress on the JTAG saga. Read about it here (excellent job Kees :) ). 2. As pointed by keesj, tincan tools have the adapter on the product page ] Today, the thought has been in creating a jtag debugger convertor - given that "ARM standard" and "TI standard" are not 1-1! Note: Tincan tools is planning on making a more professional connector than "mine" and most probably will work.. one thing I can say for sure.. OMAP still works after plugging this in.. and I can probe the chip ID from openocd we...

Finally, it is out.. nothing great as of each of the tools.. but these are handy little blokes to have around.. see the announce here Links to the project sites: * Source Code hosting: Git Hub http://github.com/nmenon/omap-u-boot-utils/ * Binaries, Defect tracking and Documentation: code.google.com - http://code.google.com/p/omap-u-boot-utils/ pserial history: They started off coz, I wanted something to work on windows and Linux equally well and I had nothing on hand.. the first app I ever wrote in this thread of thought was the perl script here . Now, perl is good but it can turn ugly too- esp for a new guy poking around.. hence wanted a pserial with a c version. While, doing that with windows, I set myself some weird targets: a) I will not use cygwin or vmware -> I wanted folks to use the exes without worrying about where the lib files should be got from! b) It will provide the user apis to be as similar as possible. I ended up with MingW compiler for windows, and the usual...

This following post is based on a reply I send to Vishal Bhoj, thought I'd share with all.. In general before starting, I suggest one does read the TRM and Data Manual pretty well. If you are starting from scratch, it may not be quick to get things running on OMAP,but the basics are same no matter which OMAP you do take.. Unfortunately, I don't think I could start explaining the entire OMAP architecture even if I wanted to.. :( I am not saying it is an herculean task doing a boot code, but it is challenging and is a good way to start really know OMAP's potential. The question was related to UART and character LCD on SDP2430/3430, and the following is a very very brief overview of what to think of as a starter.. Some basic Fundamentals: OMAP is a SOC (System On Chip) -containing ARM, DSP and other peripherals. ARM has a memory mapped interface to it's peripherals it can talk to. UART is one such peripheral, character LCD on SDP2430 on the other hand is emulated over FPG...

H/w I have: a) Beagle board rev A5 b) a 512Meg Micro SD card with adapter c) USB2Serial convertor (my laptop docking station has a PCI UART, but I hardly ever use docking stations) d) card reader Objective use the UI tools in Linux as much as possible to boot mmc card on beagleboard. Step 1: getting to know the usb sd/mmc card reader device: plugin the reader and run dmesg E.g.: [50306.414076] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 254208 512-byte hardware sectors (130 MB) [50306.419071] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off [50306.419080] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00 [50306.419084] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [50306.431052] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 254208 512-byte hardware sectors (130 MB) [50306.436051] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off [50306.436059] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00 [50306.436063] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [50306.436071] sdb: [50306.442153] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk [50306.442235] sd 6:0:0:0...