Hallo,
I just received my Olimex Sam7-EX256 board. However I don’t find the code for the flash image that is installed on that board.
Is the code available to download?
Thanks
I still did not tried to extract it from the flash through JTAG, but this seems to be the only way right now, if it is not protected.
I would believe (and I’m probably right) that Olimex is working on some frimware examples for this board, and probably new revisions of the actual running firmware will be uploaded to they’re web in a (near?) future. It’s a new product though, that means that many things are still not developed.
Guillem.
I extracted the code at 0x10000 with length 0x40000 with OpenOCD and sam7utils and it compares okay. “Strings” shows the strings seen on the serial port menu.
But still I am interested in the source code. Hopefully olimex puts the code on the website in the not to far future. bye
hi,
i have the same problem. is there any progress?
It really helps much to have a demo code for startup, and to be honest, I’m a bit disappointed that the device comes without source code or documentation (reading olime’s hp, i had the impression that the source would come with the device). Ok, it is brand new and the code / docu is eventually not yet finished. but a ‘not perfect’ example is better than none - right?
a second point: has anyone wrote down his steps to a running developement environment for the sam-ex256 under linux?
if not, i will try to get it to work using debian linux, the arm usb ocd, eclipse, openocd etc., starting from james lynch’s tutorial. would it be worth to log it here (in a separate thread)?
alex
I’m doing all of my development on Linux. The OpenOCD started as Linux software, Windows support was just added due to popular demand - it didn’t make my life any easier…
To get the OpenOCD, you’ll have to install SVN, and recent versions of the GNU autotools (automake, autoconf) to build it. The FTD2XX driver is available from ftdichip.com, and has to be manually “installed”, i.e. copied into /usr/lib/ and /usr/include/, followed by a ldconfig run.
For Eclipse, you should get the JRE/JDK from Sun, as it generally performs a lot better than the free JAVA implementations (my experience). Zylin’s CDT plugin works on Linux as well, so there’s no problem either.
Unfortunately, GNUARM doesn’t offer precompiled Linux binaries anymore, and their last Linux release was for 64-bit systems only. Codesourcery’s toolchain might work, but the Newlib that comes with their toolchain is compiled for ARMv5TE, while the SAM7’s are ARMv4T, missing the rather important BLX instruction. I’ve successfully used Tom Walsh’s scripts with minimal modifications to build a new toolchain on linux, using the most recent versions of binutils, gcc, newlib etc.
A popular alternative for building the toolchain is Dan Kegel’s Crosstool, but I haven’t tried that myself yet.
Regards,
Dominic
hi dominic,
thx for your post!
Windows support was just added due to popular demand - it didn’t make my life any easier…
i quite believe it.
i have some experience with svn, the auto tools etc., this should be no problem.
i’ll try to set the things up and report here any success/errors.
besides:
is it a false impression that most arm developers use windows?
or is the linux setup so easy that it is not worth to write something about it?
alex
a question about the ftdi library:
i guess the D2XX is recommended.
what about the libftdi from Thomas Jarosch?
alex
is it a false impression that most arm developers use windows?
or is the linux setup so easy that it is not worth to write something about it?
Definitely - only very few people use the OpenOCD on linux, at least very few problem reports come from Linux users. On the other hand, Linux users are probably more used to software that doesn’t work out of the box, but gives you the freedom to taylor it to your needs, so they’re less likely to require help with setting up the complex OpenOCD .cfg files… 
The situation is a bit different among the users of more powerful ARM systems like ARM9’s with MMU, Caches, a large SDRAM etc. - these devices are often used with Embedded Linux, and using Linux as the development platform is a natural choice for these people.
There are two configure options that enable FT2232C support --enable-ft2232_ftd2xx and --enable-ft2232_libftdi used to choose which library gets used (you can only enable one). Libftdi has the advantage of being free software (a biiiig plus), therefor it’s available on 32-bit linux, 64-bit linux, freebsd, … - FTD2XX is available only on 32-bit linux, iirc. FTD2XX has the advantage of being faster, up to 4 or 5 times as fast as libftdi.
Regards,
Dominic
A further option to consider if you want a GCC tool chain on Linux is installing eCos.
I have installed eCos on linux and this is pretty simple to do.
I must admit I never got to the stage of actually using it so I have no idea what Newlib is like or how well it supports Thumb.
Zylin who do the Eclipse plug in seem to be using it to debug eCos systems so I guess it works.
Does anybody have experience of using the eCos toolchain as a general purpose toolchain ?
I’ve installed eCos and it’s toolchain when looking into Redboot as a possible bootloader for the CS-EP9301 board from Olimex, and was rather disappointed when I checked the GCC version they used:
gcc version 3.2.1
This version of GCC is so old, you wont be able to compile a recent Linux kernel with it, current minimum should be 3.4. Also, there are known problems with GCC versions < 4.x and Thumb code.
Newlib is a stripped-down C library, a replacement for the traditional glibc.
IMHO building your own toolchain is a reasonable thing these days. It took some time (a few hours), but that’s mostly due to fetching ~100mb of tarballs and my rather slow machine. I’ve already sent alex a tarball with the scripts I used.
Best regards,
Dominic
Hi all,
I will try to compile the toolchain today und report the results in a separate topic (we are a bit off topic here, I guess ).
thx to dominic for the courteous support!
Alex
btw: I’m still looking for some example code for the sam7-ex256 olimex board (especially using the tft). any code snipped would be appreciated.
does anybody has a documentation about the variuos jumpers of the board? I’m much more into software than into hardware and don’t want to roast the board in my first trials…
as announced above, i document some SAM7-EX256 specific things at
http://www2.pt.tu-clausthal.de/~alexp/arm/index.html
(be sure to remove the masking \ in front of the tilde).
any contribution (see the ‘open questions’) would be appreciated.
Alex
To “alexatsf”: a couble of days ago i had communication with OLIMEX which at last gently provided me with all the sources for its default application on it’s SAM7-EX256 board. Well… personally i don’t know if i have the wights to send them to you but why don’t you make a contact with them? I suppose they won’t refuse to send you as well…
Oh, I bother them since days … without success so far.
No comment on that :oops:
Alex
'got the code today (should have been shipped with the first email… was a missunderstanding)
thx!
Olimex had just released the demo code for this board in its web page.