I have used the Olimex JTAG quite a lot with the Olimex SAM7 dev boards and it works very well.
However, I tried to flash an Atmel AT91SAM7X-EK board with the olimex JTAG and the board/processor aren’t recognized - times out trying to communicate with the board and obviously can’t start flashing the board.
Has anyone ever successfully used the Olimex JTAG to program the Atmel EK board?
FYI - I have a close contact at Atmel who told me he was able to fire up the Olimex JTAG USB device with the SAM7X-EK but he was using the Rowley environment. I’m using the Eclipse/Yagarto environment, so guess I’ll need to unwind that in order to keep using Eclipse/Yagarto for the EK board.
Hi Landon.
I use the Eclipse/YAGARTO environment with the Olimex JTAG USB device and have no trouble at all flashing the Atmel board.
However, I did notice that attempting to use the Olimex JTAG USB device’s power cable to supply power to the board does not work reliably when running flash programming operations. It’s OK for debugging but usually failed during flashing. Using the Olimex SAM764 board did work properly during flashing with the onboard power cable.
Seems to be a “margin” problem, doesn’t it? Try powering your Atmel board from a separate 9-volt wall wart supply.
Cheers,
Jim Lynch
Thanks, Jim. Meant to respond to this earlier.
I spent some more time on this and like my friend in Atmel and yourself, was able to flash the Atmel 7X-EK with Eclipse/Yagarto and Olimex USB JTAG. In the end, I don’t know why I couldn’t get it to work at first since it seems fine now and I just used the AC->USB power adpater that came in the 7X-EK kit.
While I’ve “got you on the line”, one of the things I haven’t been able to find in the Yagarto environment is a simple way to do a hex dump of spans of memory. There are also cases where OCD/gdb doesn’t seem to be able to start without first disabling all breakpoints and then resetting one. It throws some exception dialog box (which I can post if you want.)
Finally, I’ve seen that after I flash the device, then start a JTAG debug session, when I’m done debugging and need to make my next change, I need to unplug my JTAG from usb before I can reflash. There seems to be some kind of incompatibility between having the OCD server running and being able to reflash the board. I can provide exact error messages if this scenario doesn’t sound familiar.
I’d be curious to hear what types of issues like this are common and just need to be worked around (like “Ya, you just need to unplug the board, reflash then rerestart OCD server…that’s the way it is”) and what issues are not expected (those that are my problem with my environment.)