Tom Sylla wrote:
Another idea, there has been a lot of talk about homebrew LPC ROM emulators. It would not be much more work to make the emulator into a generic LPC analyzer. You could have it catch regular serial, or you could just have print_debug spew bytes to a specified I/O location. With careful design, high speed USB can keep up with the ~16MB/s you could spew to LPC. This would not end up costing much more than the SIO solution, the biggest cost is still the PCB/connectors (male PLCC).
For current Thincan (artecgroup/dbe61) development we are using our own designed dongles:
- LPC connector (the cable shouldn't be longer than 5cm/2 inch) - Altera Cyclone FPGA as the control part - 16 MB flash: 4x separate 4MB banks; chosen by jumpers (I can have 4 separate booting configs( LB/kernel/initrd) in one dongle) - chosen flash bank is seen as 1MB at boot, switched to 4MB mode by LinuxBIOS. After that you can address that 4MB by FILO as mem@0x.... - 4 digit LED display (POST code display + selftest) - miniUSB (by ftdi chip) for the programming flash banks - python script as programming tool
PCB is 8cm x 6cm, i have seen the case for that unit too :)
As much as I know this dongle were made available with initial price ca. €90 (in small quantities). I'd expect that such a thing (with somewhat different design) can't be much cheaper.
Indrek