responding to both emails at once...
Luc Verhaegen wrote:
On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 09:28:39PM -0700, roger wrote:
On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 00:02 -0400, Corey Osgood wrote:
BTW, anyone have experience with using a Willem EEPROM programmer under linux? I haven't been able to get the darn thing to work through wine, nor will it work on Vista. I'm starting to wonder if it's just a bum unit.
I believe there is something called firebrand that will write using the parallel part. And contacting sales at the main store selling those things, I was recommended using the parallel port one vs the usb one -- probably because the only s/w support is firebrand.
I've had a look at firebrand, but the problem is it only supports a few 27xxx model EEPROMs. No good when I'm trying to flash a 29F002, and I personally don't feel like rewriting it, at least not at the moment. I did find some info on getting the windows software to work with wine on some willem forum, but it keeps telling me the device can't be found.
I don't have too good an experience with willem.org.
- It's not a registered company, there's no VAT number. Since the
proprietor is dutch, he should have a VAT number, yet he doesn't. This is really selling things out of the back of a truck here.
For your average consumer, this makes little difference. But for me, i paid dutch VAT which i can't reclaim, this money also comes out of taxed income now, so not fun at all.
The overhead to create and run a small company in a country like .nl shouldn't be too great. But this person just installed oscommerce and thought that that was it.
One day .nl VAT/taxes will catch up with him.
- It took a very very long while for my programmer to be delivered, in
the end, another model was sent. Paid 28/01, received 12/03. Eindhoven, where this person is based, is about 120kms away.
As for the hardware:
- usb is at most only there as a powersupply. Which is not correct as
the amps drawn should be negotiated between host and endpoint. There's no means to negotiate anything. Yes, people abuse usb like this a lot.
- As far as i understood the willem, from a quick look at it, you still
shift in a bit at a time, which makes the willem _extremely_ slow.
To be honest, i haven't needed it yet, hotswapping is much much faster anyway and hasn't gone wrong yet.
So don't bother. You're only throwing money away. Just buy some roms.
Too late, bought it about a month ago. Flashrom doesn't work on this particular board, and besides, a dedicated programmer *should* be faster than booting up, flashing, and then rebooting (unless you stripped a distro down to nothing just for that purpose). It's almost guaranteed that it'd be faster than this system: boot up, copy rom from usb to floppy, reboot from disk, flash, reboot again. Also, I bought it from a canadian company (mcumall), and through ebay, no dealings with any dutch companies ;) Afaik, the Willem schematics are free for the taking, so anyone can build and/or sell one. I think I'm about to find a windows 98se cd and install that on whatever I can find, and see if this thing actually does work.
-Corey