Nishanth' tech rambles

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...

Folks who have CSST know the capability of OMAP doing something known as a peripheral boot mode support over USB and UART. on Linux, well.. looks like no one(at least to my knowledge) has done the same thing.. So, today, in the middle of cooking some kadai chicken and some chicken kebobs, i played around and got thru to give a proof of concept code( http://www.geocities.com/crecmca98/Linux/omap_linux_peripheral_boot.tgz ): 1) “Hacking” to get the vendor id and product id: I dont own a Catc or a usb monitor.. so just plugged in the board to my laptop and dumped the syslog ;) $ cat /var/log/syslog Mar 16 15:26:23 coyote NetworkManager: [1205699183.236191] nm_hal_device_added(): New device added (hal udi is '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_451_d009_N/A'). Voila!! 3430 is nothin but, VendorId = 0x0451 DeviceID = 0xD009 2) Trigger an external program to download image: Would you believe it, last time i was working in the kernel, hotplug was still working.. i...