Boot Loader for an ARM Linux System?

MGreim

Hi,

i like to use the one or two Propeller as a I/O slave for an ARM board running Linux.
(Sorry that i am using the bad words ARM and Atmel here ;-) )
I have found the BSTL and the Propellent may be running under a x86 Linux, but is there a C or (free)Pascal source for
a command line tool which i can cross-compile for a ARM AT91RM9200 under Linux?
(Maybe the serial.pas from the propellent may stripped down for this? )


Kind Regards

Markus Greim

Heater.

MGreim,

i like to use the one or two Propeller as a I/O slave for an ARM board running Linux.

An excellent idea if I may say. I've been wanting to do that for ages.

Sorry that i am using the bad words ARM and Atmel here ;-)

Not so bad, plenty of people want to use a "grown up CPU" like an ARM for the bulk of an application and the Propeller for the I/O and real-time stuff. I think it is a great symbiosis for many applications.

You may have noticed the thread going on now about the ZipIt unit (An ARM machine) coupled with the Prop. Or then there is the Android to Prop idea.

...is there a C or (free)Pascal source for a command line tool which i can cross-compile for a ARM AT91RM9200 under Linux?

Not that I know of but there is a C++ propeller loader by Andrey Demenev on this thread:
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?123020-propeller-flashing-protocol&highlight=python+propeller+loader along with a discussion of other options.

I have attached Andrey's loader here again in case you have trouble. It is written for the Qt Graphical User Interface tool kit but I think it would be easy enough to create a simple command line C version from it.

Somewhere there is a propeller loader in Python which would also serve as a good starting point for a C version.

I'd be interested in seeing whatever you come up with.

MGreim

Thanks Heater,

thanks for the good hint. I am not speaking C++ but i think i understand enough to rewrite it in C or Pascal (my favorite) . If its running i will post the source and the binary.
Any further infos welcome.

Regards

Markus

Heater.

Hopefully you don't need to know much C++ to cut that down to C.
Looks like it only has two classes so you could just extract the methods of each as C functions into one or two files. After all are you really going to need multiple instances of the loader? Throw away anything that looks like graphical UI stuff, progress bar...
Then you just have to cook up something to handle the serial port read/write and DTR tweaking.

I love Pascal as well but a C version would be more generally useful, say if you wanted to load a Prop from an AVR or some other micro.

Actually that makes me think...That proploader does not program the EEPROM only the RAM. It needs a different command somewhere to program EEPROM. Anyway it looks like we could build boards with a Prop and a cheap AVR. The AVR could boot the Prop and then provide services to it, say USB. All kinds of possibilities open up.