Hi Pedro,
On 27.11.21 00:02, Pedro Erencia wrote:
I'm thinking about porting coreboot to a FM2A88X Extreme4+ board. This board has a DIP8 flash with a socket and I wondered what would be the best way to do an efficient development cycle. Ideally, I suppose that the best option would be to use a clip test and a CH341A, but all the clips that I
the CH341A is a rather slow programmer and the most popular version uses 5V i/o while you most likely need 3.3V. I would rather use something FT*232H based (the H is important, it's high-speed and speaks SPI) or maybe a stm32 "blue-pill" with firmware from [1].
found are SOIC/SOP. Should I buy a SOIC clip and an adapter from SOIC to DIP? I've seen those adapters, but I'm not sure if they will fit well in the mobo DIP8 socket.
Not sure what adapter you are talking about. Clips are not good for development anyway; they are most useful if you want to program a device just once and then go on with the next device. What I would do (but not sure if I'd recommend that): Solder wires somewhere at to the tops of the DIP8 legs. So you could still plug it into the socket. Or maybe I would try to squeeze some stranded wire along with the chip into the socket. Anyway, I would consider something more professional, see below.
Aside from the mechanical question, I'd appreciate any advice about the safety of externally programming the board. I don't have the schematics and I wonder if there could be any risk of damaging the board.
To be safe, there should be some sort of isolation between the mainboard components and the programmer. If you don't have schematics of the main- board, you can't tell if there is any on the board already, and I would suggest a "qspimux" [2]. Usually a connector for it is soldered to the board, but it should be possible to use a DIP8 socket too.
Nico
[1] https://github.com/dword1511/stm32-vserprog [2] https://github.com/felixheld/qspimux