On Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:39:09 -0400 Corey Osgood corey.osgood@gmail.com wrote:
I've bought a Genius G540 programmer, it's a very cheap (~$60 USD on ebay) USB programmer that supports a ton of eproms and flash chips, with reasonable flashing speed, but only with Windows software. I have tried contacting the (chinese) manufacturer for documentation, but got no response. There does exist a sourceforge project, g540tool ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/g540tool/), that supports 4 flash chips, and of those 2 are parallel EPROMs, 1 is LPC flash and 1 is SPI. The downside is that with a current ubuntu install, with libusb installed, it doesn't compile, and the code is very poorly documented. I'm wondering if anyone has looked into supporting this programmer under flashrom, or else if someone with more USB and flashrom experience could take a look at the g540tool code and give me some pointers on where to start. g540tool also has an odd license that I'm not sure how would mesh with GPL.
The license is freebsd/2-clause bsd and is compatible with the gpl. Apparently a lot more reverse engineering is needed before one could try adding support to flashrom... the dediprog module of flashrom was also created by reverse engineering the traces of USB traffic sent by the windows software, so this is definitely possible with enough time in general, but looking at the existing g540tool code, this programmer requires a lot more communication than dediprog...
I think it would be best if we would ask Ivo directly what he has to say about this... hence I have added him to CC. Hi Ivo ;) If you do not know what this is about at all, please take a look at http://flashrom.org