Booting in multiple ways

It’s been a little while since I last posted but a lot has happened. We have now successfully run u-boot in both UART boot and SPI boot modes. Tim Louden managed to quickly get together a flash driver for our spi chip that allows us to interface it with u-boot. Now the real work begins. The kernel itself. We found that the version of the toolchain that we were using was not compatible with the version of the kernel that we were using so we reverted back to the most recent release of the kernel rather than the svn version. This is currently being worked into the repository and hopefully linux hacking can begin tomorrow. Once we get the kernel booting the next big task is to see if we can get the audio codec to respond.

Memory or Forgetfullness

We attempted to test the SDRAM today. We were able to test putting different patterns into memory location 0×00000000 and reading them back. We then tried to do a sweep of all of memory, but we were not able to successfully complete it. The SDRAM chip started getting warm during this process but we are not sure why. Tomorrow we will investigate whether there is any bus contention and we will continue working on our memory test algorithm.

Lights!

Well, we were able to execute code that we wrote on the board. We now have an 8-bit debug interface made out of LEDs. The next issue seems to be loading the bootloader into the SDRAM. The SDRAM is configured but maybe not properly.

Long Time … No Post

Well, it’s been nearly 10 months since I’ve done anything useful with this blog. Fortunately it has not been 10 months since I’ve worked on the project. The first batch of prototype boards came back in December and I have been steadily making progress towards getting Linux up and running on the board. All of the chips (minus the audio codec) have at least had an initial test. This summer I have three other guys working on the project with me their blogs are at Tim Louden Jace Akerlund and Allen T. Waters .