SD loader

Filip S

Hello everyone

I wonder if there is anyone who has made an object to load a pre-compilied eeprom-file from an SD card to the propeller and then run it. Otherwise a fat-filesystem reader in assembler could be rewritten to do this. I'm doing a project with the propeller that could really use this function.

Thanks
Filip

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Paul Baker

Yes this has been done, several people have worked in conjuction to get the peices together. Mike Green's OS has the functionality, if you want a relatively stripped down example of its use look for my kiosk.zip in this thread: http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=643397

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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer

Parallax, Inc.

Mike Cook

Here's a stripped down boot loader, that I use. Loads a *.binary from a SD card, file name·that is loaded is TEST.BIN

SD card is installed on PINs: 0..3 and uses the TV-Text object, on pins 12..15, to display errors. Should be enough comments in the 'top' file to get you going.

Most/All of the work is biased on Mike Green's & Tom Rokicki's efforts with FemtoBasic & fsrw-and-friends programs.

Have fun, if it's not useful to you please delete!

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Mike

Paul Baker

An even simpler example, thanks Mike.

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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer

Parallax, Inc.

Filip S

Thanks Mike.

It'll surley be very usefull for the project I'm working on right now. It's a propeller based thing with a built-in keyboard and a small serial display. I've only got one or two EEPROM-packs, and soon I'll have more than two applications for it. So a SD with all the apps will come very handy.

I haven't been able to try it yet, the link doesn't work right now, trying again soon.

Filip

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Paul Baker

Flip, make sure you are choosing the save option rather than open, Internet Explored has difficulty opening zip files located in your temporary file area.

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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer

Parallax, Inc.

Filip S

I know, but i got error 404 when I clicked the link. But now it works.

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Filip S

Thanks again mike. This seems exactly what I wanted! It also works perfectly on my demoboard! I'm going to do a simple UI to it so that it's easier to select among more files.
But I've got a small problem, the card doesn't mount correctly (on my hommade board). I've hooked the card up to pins 19-22 with 10K resistors (i've tried with 20K too) and I get the error -972, wich is the negative pointer to the string "InitSDCard mount". I've changed pin numbers in the code too.

Filip

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Post Edited (Filip S) : 6/18/2007 9:46:01 AM GMT

Mike Cook

Filip,

You might try downloading FemtoBasic from the Propeller Object exchange and try that on your home made board. The 'boot loader' I made is basically that, I·just pulled out what I did not need as a base for a new file.

However I would suspect that the SD pins will need to be groups of 4 (at multiples of 4), such as:

0..3
4..7
8..11
12..15
16..19
20..23
24..27

I have not tested it with the SD mounted on other sets of PINs.

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Mike

Filip S

I tried to move the pins on my demo-board to 1..4 and tested. That worked anyway.

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Filip S

No, I tried, it isn't any difference. Is there any importance about 10 or 20 K pullup resistors?

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Mike Cook

Not sure, I've always used 20K, there might be some more·info here:

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=622673

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Mike

Filip S

When i wired the sd-card to my Demo Board i used 10K, because I didn't have any 20K at home, it works very well, but when I build this one I bought 20K, because the documentation says so. But now I tried with 10K on this board too.

Filip

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Mike Cook

If your using the same SD card between both the Demo Board (Working - SD card installed on 0..3) and Home made board (not-Working - SD card installed on 19..22), Then the next step in debugging this is to go grab FemtoBasic from the object exchange. Get that working as-is with out any modifications. Then try moving the SD interface to pins 19..22. If FemtoBasic works on pins 19.22 then it's quite possible I left something out that's causing the problem. When I originally modified FemtoBasic to be just a 'boot loader' it worked so I left the SD interface on pins 0..3

In the above archive, only the 'Top file' was modified, objects:

fsrwFemto.spin

sdspiFemto.spin

TV-Text.spin

TV.spin

were left in their original state.

This basically was a test, next step in it's evolution is to rip out the TV object, replace it with the serial object, so I can connect it to a PC running a terminal program. Then add the Xmodem protocol so I can up/download files to the 'boot loader' via a serial connection. This is a future wireless project, PC terminal will be replaced with some type of wireless technology, probably a GSM/GPRS modem or Xbee.


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Mike

Post Edited (Mike Cook) : 6/18/2007 1:16:02 PM GMT

Filip S

I might was unclear, I used YOUR code to interface a SD on pins 1..4, not FemtoBasic. Anyway, I can't run FemtoBasic on my own board, because I haven't got a TV or VGA-connector to it, it's a serial display called microOLED.

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Mike Green

Filip,
FemtoBasic is pretty flexible in terms of a display. There is a variation (also in the Object Exchange) called BoeBotBasic that uses a serial port for the "console" and will even work with the programming port and your PC.

Filip S

Now i've tried BoeBot basic and changed the pins. It says can't mount SD-card. I noted a difference in time between having the wrong pin-numbers and the right pin numbers. I think that means that it does something anyway.
Is there anyway of getting more specific error messages out of BoeBotBasic?(not just Can't mount SD-card, it also says a possible reason why it can't)
Is there an easy way to see wich pin(s) are wrong (I assume there is a hardware error, even if I can't find it, even if i've searched for it)

Filip

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Post Edited (Filip S) : 6/18/2007 9:01:43 PM GMT

Mike Green

Unfortunately, the routine in BoeBotBasic doesn't have much information about why the failure occurred. When I was debugging the SD card support, I inserted debugging statements directly into the SD support routines supplied by Rokicki and that helped somewhat. The low level routines are in assembly and don't have much information to report ... either the data comes in or it doesn't. I'd carefully check your wiring. Occasionally I would wire up an SD card backwards and it wouldn't work.

rokicki

Actually, I did make the routines generate very specific return codes that indicate specifically what went wrong.
Just grep abort *.spin and you'll see the codes. For debugging, you should definitely just use sdspi.spin (the
spin versions) and not the assembly versions since they do have more information available. If you get a
mount failure in BoeBASIC it should report the error code which you can look up in the source. If you need to
you can add that code (it should be pretty easy to do; just look for backslashes; those are where the abort
codes are being collected.)

On the other hand, if the initialization sequence isn't even working (that is, the wires are not hooked up right)
then you'll essentially get no response from the card at all which is just a timeout condition on waiting for a
response, and this is very tough to debug from the software end. Here there's not much more you can do
than verifying the connections and/or slapping a scope on the pins. Just run mount in a loop and start looking
at the wires and check the responses.

Post Edited (rokicki) : 6/18/2007 9:28:48 PM GMT

Filip S

Now I hooked up my old SD-connector (on the demo board) with wires to my new board, that did work with rokiki's FSRW(the card got mounted, but i couldn't use nextfile), but not with BoeBotBasic or Mike's modified version of it. Strange.

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Filip S

Now I finally got it working, Thanks everyone!

I found out that it was my SD-reader holder·that was bad. I'm trying to fix it.

Filip

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Post Edited (Filip S) : 6/19/2007 12:24:00 PM GMT