[hpsdr] Programming Hermes Help

[Jeremy McDermond]

On Dec 2, 2012, at 5:36 PM, "Phil Harman" <phil at pharman.org> wrote:

> Hi Jeremy,
> 
> "When the FPGA boots, it checks the position of the jumper to see from
> what address in the flash it should start loading.  If the jumper is on,
> it loads from the beginning.  If it's off, it starts from 0x10000."
> 
> Not quite. When the FPGA boots is always loads the bootloader from address
> 0x00000.
> 
> Once the bootloader code is running in the FPGA is reads the state of the
> jumper. If inserted it remains in bootloader mode. If removed it resets
> the FPGA and instructs it to load from EEPROM address 0x10000.

Okay, my bad.  That's what happens when I only skim the documentation. :p

This may be a really stupid idea, but I'm going to put it out there anyhow.  Perhaps we should make it so that the normal image checks for the jumper and actually refuses to run with a creative LED configuration (or check to see what memory address it's in).  We seem to run into some issues with people who program with the USB Blaster and blow away their boot loader image.  It would be better to have these things break sooner rather than later.  It might have even prevented boards being shipped with bad FPGA loads.  Again, we should make it set a weird set of LED jumpers (maybe like all LEDs flashing) before it refuses to run so that it's really easy to debug.

> 73 Phil...VK6APH

--
Jeremy McDermond (NH6Z)
Xenotropic Systems
mcdermj at xenotropic.com




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