hey there! (cross-posted to both mailing lists)
i am currently designing a small and cheap platform to recover from coreboot and other failures easily. the reason i am writing this is to get feedback from you regarding desired features of and interest in such a device.
right now my plan is the following: an avr atmegaXXu2 is connected via usb and implements the serprog protocol to let flashrom make use of it. the avr can operate down to 3.0V which would allow easy interfacing with today's spi flashes without any level shifting. to get the desired supply voltage from usb's 5V i will use a fixed 3.3V ldo voltage regulator (ld1117). apart from a few supporting parts (caps, fuse, usb line termination etc.) the only things missing are sockets for the spi chips.
at the moment i am planing to include: - soic8 pads (combined for 150 and 200mil devices) and enough room for a soic8 zif adapter (like the one from http://bios-repair.co.uk)
- vias for a 24 pin zif dip/dil socket (150 and 300mil spacing combined): 8 pins for dip8 flashes and 16 for soic16 flashes (those would require a soic to dip adapter). 8pin and 16pin flashes dont share pins therefore the large socket...
- vias for a single row 8pin header to allow attaching probes/test clips (e.g. http://www.pomonaelectronics.com/images/large/6109.jpg) to hook up in-situ flashes.
parts for this excluding the pcb would be in the 10-25$ range. depending on how many pcbs i/we would produce the whole thing would cost probably about 40$. not THAT cheap, but quite better than the dediprog stuff :) it would also be more convenient and open than the FT2232SPI based on the DLP-USB1232H (http://flashrom.org/FT2232SPI_Programmer). the willem programmers seem to be lpt only? are there any other cheap flashers i dont know?
i am not sure about what to do with soic16 chips. the solution laid out above which requires an additional adapter and wastes a lot of space is awkward. should i just include soic16 pads instead? should i drop support for them altogether and let the user hook them up with clips? are they in use anywhere? my intel desktop board has pads for it, but i am not sure if there are any boards in the wild which really use them...
i was also thinking about an offline mode which uses an SD-card or another flash to store/load an image for the target flash. push buttons would activate a cloning operation. this way one could clone chips easily without a pc, but i am not sure at all if thats worth it.
what do you think?