LPC MT 2138 will not communicate no matter what

Development Boards MicroMod
1

Howdy All

Please bear with me as I am new to ARM (how many times have you heard that!!) but I have worked on Motorolla HC68’s before and have done some programming in C and VB.

Well I have purchased an LPC MT 2138 with the USB tiny JTAG. I cannot for the life of me get anything to communicate. I have run through the Eclipse Tutes and it always gets an error when initialising the JTAG. I have tried Crossworks and it states that it cannot detect board, make sure it is powered (it is). I have tried the Phillips Flash utility and a straight RS232 connection and it states cannot communicate.

When I power on the board the LCD shows 16 black squares on the top row. That is about it.

Is it dead or am I just dumb :slight_smile:

2

Some good news!

I can now get the Phillips utility to find the board, clear Flash, upload and compare, etc. But none of my code (or anyone else) will run. I have loaded the standard LED flash program and while it loads ok, and the Phillips utility executes the code, I get no flashes. I have tried both in RAM and Flash. I have tried other programs, such as a buttons and LCD test with no results.

Is there anyway to tell if the board or a component is faulty. Any obvious signs other than a smoking IC.

Is it normal to get the 16 black boxes on the top LCD line upon power up?

Would there be any reason why the JTAG Tiny cannot detect the board?

3

I am newbie too, a while ago i encounter the same problem but with LPC2138, so I just try to share.

If you download your code via Philips flash utility, you must define the START_UP_FROM_RESET on your startup code then recompile the code, and download the hex to your board, switch the “ISP RUN” switch, and reset.

I dont really know much about JTAG, but you dont try to extend your wire, are you? JTAG is meant to be that short.

Have you check your parallel port setting?

I suppose there are couple mode, I forget which one (mine is working on the first try), but if it works to download any other micro then it should be fine.

That is as far as I know for now.

p.s: try to search the forum, I think I have seen this kind of problem before.

4

MacGyver:
Some good news!

I can now get the Phillips utility to find the board, clear Flash, upload and compare, etc. But none of my code (or anyone else) will run. I have loaded the standard LED flash program and while it loads ok, and the Phillips utility executes the code, I get no flashes. I have tried both in RAM and Flash. I have tried other programs, such as a buttons and LCD test with no results.

  1. Is there anyway to tell if the board or a component is faulty. Any obvious signs other than a smoking IC.

  2. Is it normal to get the 16 black boxes on the top LCD line upon power up?

  3. Would there be any reason why the JTAG Tiny cannot detect the board?

  1. If the Phillips utility is working, then ARM is working, since it can communicate with the Phillips utility.

  2. Since you said that you cleared the FLASH and were then were unable to get anything else into the chip in working order, then the display is most likely just going to stay in it’s reset state. IE, no feel good message.

  3. Yes, there are plenty of reasons, but you did not say what error message your debugger driver (OpenOCD ??? ) gave you. Any communication error could be a cause of your JTAG driver not detecting the board. That could be due to a faulty USB driver installation, incorrect JTAG configuration in OpenOCD (if that is what you are using?), a hardware defect, or software that disabled the LPC2138 JTAG port, to mention a few.

It would proably be a good idea to debug the JTAG setup, so that you can examine whatever code you have in the LPC2138 to find out what is going on with your LCD display. If you are using OpenOCD it would probably help to post your OpenOCD error messages in the OpenOCD forum to get help with understanding why it cannot communicate through your JTAG pod.

–Dave