Propeller Demo board's Demo program in eeprom

prof_braino

Hi!

Where can I find the source or binary image of the demo program that is initially loaded on the Propeller Demo board EEPROM?

I found VGA, TV terminal, keyboard, mouse, and microphone demos on the object exchange; but I didn't find the one that has all these in a single image.

As an alternative, is there a way to save the EEPROM image to a file on the PC?

I just want to reload the EEPROM to its original state between project to ensure all the hardware is still working.

Thanks!

MagIO2

Have a look at the demo board product page : http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/PropellerDevelopmentBoards/tabid/514/CategoryID/73/List/0/Level/a/ProductID/340/Default.aspx?SortField=ProductName%2cProductName

There you find a ZIP with the demo board program.

Reading an EEPROM makes no sense, as you usually are the one who programs the EEPROM, so you already have the content on your PC.
For development it's much better to load the programs into RAM only as even EEPROMs wear out. If you always write your code to EEPROM for each test-run it will wear out very fast. On my EEPROM I have what I call CogOS, which allows to run any EEPROM-file from SD card. So the EEPROM does not need to be changed unless I have a new version of CogOS. But I'm able to run any program after switching on my development board.

Post Edited (MagIO2) : 4/22/2010 6:23:32 AM GMT

TonyWaite

@MagIO2

Your CogOS approach looks to be very useful, actually unbeatable for a lot of applications.
I've googled it to see if we're lucky enough for it to be in the Obex, without joy.

Have you any plans to post it?

Regards,

T o n y

MagIO2

Once it is in a state that allows it to be released to the public I will do it. But currently there is to much in development and it's to hard to install, because all the drivers used in the CogOS (TV, SD, keyboard) are located in upper 32kB of the 64kB EEPROM. So these don't waste any valuable memory. This is one of the minimum requirements I have for the OS - allow to have a set of drivers in upper memory and provide a CogOScore to load those drivers by name in each application. That would be cool because then the community can write programs that run on any system - as long as the drivers are available - without the need to find all that nifty constants and start-calls that define which pins to use. Another cool thing would be to incorporate the YMODEM to allow download of EEPROM-files and the drivers via terminal software. Then there is no need to unplug the SD card.

But there are other OSes which also allow loading EEPROM files and which are available. PropDOS? FemtoBasic?

prof_braino

Thanks, MagIO2. I knew it must be out there, I foolishly looked in the Product Info > Microcontrollers > Propeller General Information > Propeller Downloads
for the propeller software. Silly me. [noparse]:)[/noparse] Maybe there could be could be some mention of this in the software or downloads pages?

And thanks for the tip on running binaries from the SD card. I will be looking at PropDOS and FemtoBasic, and waiting for your CogOS.

However, I question that "reading the eeprom makes no sense". Having source code is another way to get the image so it can be re-loaded into eeprom, but there are lots of situations where one would want to read the eeprom. Particularly where it is necessary to check where something got changed (or not). Unless you are saying that the prop is incapable of revealing the contents of the eeprom? I know that the AVR family has fuse bits which can be set such that portions of memory cannot be verified; is the prop designed to make the eeprom unreadable?

MagIO2

I should have been more specific: It does not make sense to download a program from EEPROM to PC because you have the sources and you can build the content of the EEPROM by yourself. But yes, you're right ... there might be data in the EEPROM which is written by the Propeller itself and which you are interested in ... but your initial question looked like you only want to replace the current program in EEPROM with the original test program from time to time - so I focused on program images somehow.

The propeller tool only supports upload, no download. There are currently 2 easy ways to provide data to the PC:
1. Hyperterminal on PC side + YMODEM on propeller side (there is currently a active thread about YMODEM).
2. SD Card

A minor problem with 1. is, that the Hyperterminal resets the propeller when you start it. So you can't use it with a program that you only write to RAM. During development this is a pain.

A more sophisticated way would be to have your own PC program which get's the binary data via serial interface and converts it to a readable/displayable form on the PC.


And NO ... there is no way to make an EEPROM unreadable!

kuroneko

This thread may help http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=843565.

prof_braino

Thanks, black cat. That was just what I was looking for.