read back

seniorvos

Hello everybody,
Who knows a way to read back the contents of a working propeller? To be more precice: I would like to read which programm is in the propellerchip.
Thanks!

Mike Green

You can't actually "read back" what's inside the Propeller chip from outside the chip. The program running would have to provide information about itself somehow. There's no flash memory in the Propeller nor any other kind of memory that remains when there's no power. On the other hand, the program used by the Propeller when it starts up is stored in an external EEPROM (typically a 24LC256 32K byte I2C EEPROM). You can remove this EEPROM (carefully) from whatever board you're using and read this using an EEPROM reader. You can also download an EEPROM reading program to the Propeller's RAM and use that to dump the contents of the EEPROM. You can use FemtoBasic to do this or you can write your own program using "Basic_I2C_Driver" from the Object Exchange.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

You can write a Spin program, uploadable to RAM, which reads the contents of the EEPROM and sends it back to the PC. This data can then be compared with the .eeprom files produced by the programs in question to determine which one was loaded.

-Phil

Bill Henning

Like others said, it is possible to read back the eeprom, BUT:

1) It will not give you Spin source code, as it is byte codes + pasm + data

2) You cannot easily modify it (see 1 above)

3) If it is someone else's product, you can't just copy it

seniorvos wrote: »

Hello everybody,
Who knows a way to read back the contents of a working propeller? To be more precice: I would like to read which programm is in the propellerchip.
Thanks!

seniorvos

Thanks for the fast replies! As you problaby noticed I'm completely new to Parallax and Propeller. I bought the Propeller Activity board. When I powered it I noticed 8 leds which one after the other turned on and off. Obviously there was a working programm on board. On the CD, originating from inexglobal.com, I could not figure out which programm this was.

Bill Henning

Here's what I found when looking for docs for you:

http://forums.parallax.com/archive/index.php/t-106525.html

' LED sequencer on P16..P23

main | led
  dira[16..23]~~
  repeat
     repeat led from 16 to 23
         outa[16..23]~
         outa[led]~~
         waitcnt(cnt+40_000_000)

seniorvos wrote: »

Thanks for the fast replies! As you problaby noticed I'm completely new to Parallax and Propeller. I bought the Propeller Activity board. When I powered it I noticed 8 leds which one after the other turned on and off. Obviously there was a working programm on board. On the CD, originating from inexglobal.com, I could not figure out which programm this was.