[hpsdr] Metis bootloader files?

[Joe Martin]

Hi John, 

If you are going to use your Byteblaster cable to reload your flash memory on Metis you will not be using Metis.rbf.  Instead you will use an “output_file.pof” that contains two images, a Metis bootloader image and a Metis FPGA image, as described in Phil’s “Metis - How it works” document.  

To use the blaster cable you will be using Altera’s Programmer utility, which you may download as a stand alone program from: 

https://wl.altera.com/download/software/prog-software/12.1

or if you happen to have the full Quartus II package (huge download) already on your system, the programmer utility is also part of the full download.  

If you have difficulty finding a suitable output_file.pof for Metis, I will be happy send you one and help you get through the steps in using the programmer if you wish.  I just noticed that the latest output_file.pof I have contains the Metis_v1.9 firmware so that is very old.  If you wish I can prepare a Metis output_file.pof that contains both the Metis bootloader image and the latest Metis firmware (Metis_v3.0) as the FPGA image and send that to you.  The old output_file.pof I have one would work to get your flash memory back up but the Metis board would come up with v1.9 Metis and you’d then need to update to v3.0 in the normal fashion using Metis_v3.0.rbf.  I can save you that step at least by providing you with an output_file.pof that already contains the latest v3.0 image.  

Let me know if you would like me to assist you with the Metis flash memory reloading task.  If so, we should probably do it off list, I think, as it will turn out to be helpful to pass screen shot attachments to each other if we run into any difficulties in the process.  If someone else has already volunteered to help you instead that’s perfectly fine by me, no problem on my end.  

73, Joe K5SO


On May 3, 2015, at 3:05 PM, John Ackermann N8UR wrote:

> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
> 
> I'm now getting back to the mystery of my unprogrammable Metis setup. It was suggested a while ago that perhaps my boards didn't have the bootloader code installed.  I've ordered a $9 Byteblaster so will be ready to try installing that way.
> 
> But I'm not sure if I need some file other than the Metis 3.0 RBF file in order to install the bootloader code to avoid this problem in the future.  Is there another image I should be grabbing?  I wasn't able to find anything about this on the web site.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> John


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